The Wounded Jung: Effects of Jung's Relationships on His Life and Work 9780810115767, 081011576X

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Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, is widely considered an intuitive genius with a profound understanding of the peculiar spiritual dilemmas of modern man. In this book, Robert C. Smith shows how Jung’s interest in the healing of the psyche was rooted in the conflicts of his own childhood.

Smith begins by exploring Jung’s formative and transformative life experience, including his rela¬ tionships with a deeply troubled mother and despairing father, with Sigmund Freud, and with the various women in his life. The relationships to his parents, in particular, have been remarkably unexplored by scholars. Smith then shows how these experiences shaped Jung’s thoughts and writing—including his reassessment of religion as inner process—as well as his fascination with gnosticism and alchemy; the attention Jung gives to psychology as myth and the realization of selfhood; and his reinterpretation of evil as a process to be integrated into the proper sphere of human existence.

THE WOUNDED JUNG

»*

PSYCHOSOCIAL ISSUES

General Editor

Eric A. Plaut, M.D. Advisory Board

Richard D. Chessick, M.D. Solomon Cytrynbaum, Ph.D. Kenneth I. Howard, Ph.D. Alan A. Lipton, M.D., M.P.H. Thomas F. A. Plaut, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Effects of Jung’s Relationships on His Life and Work

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press 625 Colfax Street Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210 Copyright © 1996 by Robert C. Smith All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

isbn

0-8101-1270-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Robert C. The wounded Jung : effects of Jung’s relationships on his life and work / Robert C. Smith, p.

cm. — (Psychosocial issues)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn

0-8101-1270-1 (alk. paper)

1. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961. 2. Psychoanalysts—Switzerland—Biography. and child.

4. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.

3. Parent I. Title.

II. Series. BF109.J8S65

1996

i5o.i9'54'o92—dc2o [b]

95-52247 CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

ansi

Z39.48-1984.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments, vii Chronology of Jung’s Life, by Aniela Jaffe, ix Introduction, i part I.

1

Formative and Transformative Life Experiences

Mother No. i and Mother No. 2,13

2 The Personal and Mythic Father, 32 3 Jung and Freud: A Daimonic Tug-of-War, 42 4 Creative Illness: Jung’s Relation to the Unconscious, 62 5 The Lost Feminine: Jung’s Relationships with Women, 81 part ii .Jung

as Modern Man in Search of a Soul

6 Great Minds: The Impact of Received Ideas, 99 7 The Urgency of Spirituality: Jung’s Relation to the Divine, 119 8 Self and Myth: A Modern Integration, 140 9 Creativity and Healing: Jung’s Relation to His Inner Daimon, 159 Postscript, 176 Notes, 179 Glossary, 183 References, 187 Index, 203

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jung is a complex personality who wrote in a style that is often esoteric and frequently obscure. Over the years I have found his life and writings a source of both inspiration and exasperation. Nonethe¬ less, his writings repay careful study. Writing this book has been in some respects a humbling experience. It has made me confront the limitations not only of my own knowledge but also of my own disci¬ pline, the history and psychology of religion. I view my efforts here as an attempt to integrate several recent studies on Jung and to begin the task of formulating an interpretive synthesis of his life and contribution. In what follows I will present and consider several issues that have been ignored by most of Jung’s biographers. I will focus upon Jung’s childhood conflicts and experi¬ ences and seek to show how these presaged topics that engaged him throughout his life: healing, creativity, and religious experience. Robert Barton once stated that we are dwarfs who see further be¬ cause we stand on the shoulders of giants. I believe Jung was one of the giants of our time, an intuitive genius who saw profoundly into the peculiar spiritual dilemmas of modern man. A word of thanks is due to the many individuals and institutions who have assisted the research and writing of this book. Their help and encouragement as well as friendly criticisms have improved my efforts in both style and substance. This study began in a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar at the University of Chicago under the direction of Peter Homans. Professor Homans encouraged me to deepen and consider¬ ably expand what began as a paper for his summer seminar. Addition¬ ally, numerous release time grants and a sabbatical leave grant from the Committee on Faculty and Institutional Research at Trenton State College have aided my work. Assisted by an additional Travel to Collections Grant from the National Endowment for the Humani¬ ties, I was able to conduct research at the C. G. Jung Institute in Kiisnacht during the summer of 1988. The institute invited me to serve as a visiting lecturer and thus offered access to materials that would have been impossible to secure elsewhere. Acknowledgments

vii

I also want to thank Dr. Richard J. Wolfe, curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the C. G. Jung Archive of the Francis A. Count¬ way Library of Medicine in Boston, for the gracious assistance I re¬ ceived there. Dr. Wolfe and his staff gave me access to invaluable unpublished interview materials in the collection. My special thanks goes to those who have read the manuscript and offered suggestions for its improvement. They are John Lounibos, Stanley Riukas, Peter Homans, Malcolm Diamond, Peter Hoffer, Kenneth Vos, Gene Thursby, Nelson Evans, Joseph Gorczynski, Daniel Noel, John Haule, Lee Harrod, and Elizabeth Johnson. I am, of course, responsible for the mistakes that remain. Lastly, I want to thank my wife, Barbara, whose refreshing en¬ couragement and unfailing optimism have been much in evidence throughout. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, for permission to quote short pas¬ sages from interviews conducted between 1969 and 1972 by Gene F. Nameche with Ruth Bailey, Susanne (Wolff) Triib, Fowler McCor¬ mick, and John Layard, and for access to other unpublished materials in the library’s collection. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Stanley Riukas for permission to quote from his letter of September 18,1990, to Robert C. Smith. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material. Chronology from C. G.Jung: Word and Image, edited by Aniela Jaffe. Copyright © 1979 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by per¬ mission of Princeton University Press. Excerpts from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C. G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe. Translation copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, renewed 1989,1990,1991 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd. Excerpts from Daniel Noel, “Veiled Kabir: C. G. Jung’s Phallic SelfImage,” in Spring (1974): 224-42. Reprinted by permission of the author.

viii

Acknowledgments

CHRONOLOGY OF JUNG’s LIFE by Aniela Jaffe

i875 Born July 26 to Johann Paul Achilles Jung (1842-96), then parson at Kesswil, Switzerland, and Emilie Preiswerk Jung (1848-1923).

i879 The family moves to Klein-Hiiningen, near Basel. 1895-1900 Assistant physician under Bleuler at the Burgholzli, the men¬ tal hospital of Canton Zurich and psychiatric clinic of Zurich University. 1896 Death of father. 1902 M.D. dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of Socalled Occult Phenomena.” Winter semester (1902-3) with Pierre Janet at the Salpetriere, in Paris, for the study of theoretical psychopathology.

I9°3 Marriage to Emma Rauschenbach. 1903-5 Experimental researches on word associations and complexes, later associated with archetypes. Studies in Word Association. 1905-9 Senior staff physician at the Burgholzli. Conducts policlinical courses on hypnotic therapy. Research on schizophrenia.

I9°5_I3 Lecturer on medical faculty of Zurich University; lectures on psychoneuroses and psychology. 1906 Correspondence with Freud begins.

I9°7 First meeting with Freud, in Vienna. 1908 First International Psychoanalytic Congress.

Chronology

IX

I9°9 First visit to the United States, with Freud and Ferenczi; lectures on association experiment at Clark University, receives honorary LL.D. degree. 1909- 13 Editor of Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. 19x0 Reading and lectures on mythology, leading to 1911-12 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), later revised as Symbols of Transformation. 1910- 14 First president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. 1912 Another visit to the United States for a series of lectures at Fordham University on the Theory of Psychoanalysis. “New Paths in Psychology,” later revised and expanded as “On the Psychology of the Unconscious.” 1913 Break with Freud. Fourth International Psychoanalytic Con¬ gress, Munich. Jung designates his psychology as “analytical psychology.” Resigns lectureship at Zurich University. I9i3~I9 Period of intense introversion and confrontation with the un¬ conscious. 1916 Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), text resulting from his encounter with the unconscious. First mandala painting. First description of active imagination in “The Transcendent Function.” First use of terms personal unconscious, collective unconscious, individuation, animus/anima, and persona, in “The Structure of the Unconscious.” 1918-19 Medical Corps doctor and commandant of camp for interned British soldiers in Switzerland. First use of the term archetype in “Instinct and the Unconscious.” 1920 Journey to Algeria and Tunisia. First summer seminar in England, at Cornwall. x

Chronology

1921 Psychological Types (published in English, 1923); first use of the term self J923

First Tower built in Bollingen. Death of mother. Summer semi¬ nar at Polzeath, Cornwall, on Technique of Analysis. 1924- 25 Trip to United States; visits Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, also New Orleans and New York.

I925 First English seminar at the Psychological Club, Zurich. 1925- 26 Trip to Kenya, Uganda, and the Nile; visits with the Elgonyi on Mount Elgon. 1928 Beginning of encounter with alchemy. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 1928-30 English seminars on Dream Analysis at the Psychological Club, Zurich. 1929 Publication, with commentary, of The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Richard Wilhelm, an ancient Chinese text on yoga and alchemy. I93°

Vice-president of General Aledical Society for Psychotherapy, under Ernst Kretschmer as president. 1930-34 English seminars on Interpretations of Visions at the Psycho¬ logical Club, Zurich. 1932 Awarded Literature Prize of the City of Zurich.

1933 Publication of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, a widely read introduction to Jung’s ideas. Beginning of annual Eranos confer¬ ences, where Jung lectured until 1951; fifSt lecture, A Study in the Process of Individuation.” 1934 Second lecture, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.” Chronology

xi

l934-39 English seminars on Psychological Aspects of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” at the Psychological Club, Zurich. Edited Zentralblatt fiir Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete (Leipzig). *935 Appointed titular professor at the Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (E.T.H.), Zurich. Presents Tavistock Lectures at the Institute of Medical Psychology, London.

x936 Receives honorary doctorate from Harvard University. Eranos lecture, “Ideas of Redemption in Alchemy,” expanded as part 3 of Psychology and Alchemy. “ Wotan.” x937 Presents Terry Lectures on Psychology and Religion at Yale University. *938 Invitation to India on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Indian Science Congress, Calcutta. Honorary doctorates from the Universities of Calcutta, Benares, and Allahabad. International Congress for Psychotherapy at Oxford, with Jung as presi¬ dent. Receives honorary doctorate from Oxford University; appointed Honorable Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Eranos lecture, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” 1941 With Karl Kerenyi, published Essays on a Science of Mythology. J943 Honorable member of the Swiss Academy of Sciences; appointed to the chair of Medical Psychology at Basel University. *944 Resigns Basel chair on account of critical illness. Psychology and Alchemy. *945 Honorary doctorate from University of Geneva on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Eranos lecture, “The Psychology of the Spirit,” expanded as “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales.”

Xll

Chronology

1946 Eranos lecture, “The Spirit of Psychology.” “The Psychology of Transference.” 1948 Eranos lecture, “On the Self,” expanded to chapter 4 of Aion. In¬ auguration of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich, the first training institute for Jungian analysis.

1951 Aion. Jung’s last Eranos lecture, “On Synchronicity,” expanded as “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” 1952

Symbols of Transformation, fourth revised edition of Psychology of the Unconscious. Answer to Job. 1953

Publication of the first volume of the American/British edition of the Collected Works (translated by R. F. C. Hull). Psychology and Alchemy. 1955 Honorary doctorate from the E.T.H., Zurich, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Death of his wife, Emma.

1955-56 Mysterium Coniunctionis, the final work on the psychological significance of alchemy. I957 The Undiscovered Self. Starts work on Memories, Dreams, Reflec¬ tions, with the collaboration of Aniela Jaffe (published 1961). BBC television interview.

958

!

“Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth.”

1960 Made Honorary Citizen of Kiisnacht on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday.

1961 Finishes his last work ten days before his death: “Approaching the Unconscious,” published in 1964 in Man and His Symbols. Dies after short illness on June 6 in his home at Kiisnacht.

Chronology

xiii

'

THE WOUNDED JUNG

The inwardjourneys of the mythological hero . . . are in principle the same. —Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By Inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. — C. G. Jung, Letters

Introduction

The Wounded Jung explores the life and writings of the celebrated psychiatrist of Kiisnacht, Switzerland, Carl Gustav Jung. Jung is of central importance in the recovery of the spiritual quest for healing and wholeness and in the formulation of an intimate connec¬ tion between psychology and religion. This study shows that Jung was an intuitive giant who profoundly saw into the peculiar spiritual dilemmas of modern man. It demonstrates how Jung’s interest in the healing of the psyche was unmistakably rooted in the conflicts with a troubled father and a mentally ill mother in his own childhood. Since Jung himself was in many ways a divided self, his real life story illus¬ trates the maxim “Physician, heal thyself.” i

This book presents Jung as a wounded healer who, because he confronted throughout his life the divided parts of his own psyche, was enabled to become a healer of others. It shows how Jung’s own life experience led to his intense interest in confrontation with the unconscious, the creative exploration of religious images, myth and symbol, philosophy and literature, in the process of “soul making.” The central theme of this book, briefly stated, is that because of his “wounded” childhood, Jung was to embark, even as a child, on ways to integrate his life. As he candidly states in his autobiography, he possessed a dual personality, like his mother. Through a host of creative and imaginative means such as attention to dreams, fantasies, and later what he was to call active imagination, he was to find the key to effective utilization of his unconscious processes. That is to say, over a span of years Jung was to confront creatively and to a sig¬ nificant degree to overcome his personal pathology. Over time, amid numerous rationalizations and obscurities that can be found in his theoretical works, he acquired insight and, albeit through pain, be¬ came an integrated person. Only toward the end of his life, however, in Answer to Job and in his autobiography, did he effectively confront, still in a somewhat disguised and selective way, the effects of his child¬ hood trauma. At long last Jung had achieved a measure of gnosis and, as D. W. Winnicott has put it, achieved exceptional “insight into the feelings of those who are inwardly split” (Winnicott review 450). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung devotes several chapters to the importance of what he terms Personalities No. 1 and No. 2 in his formative experience. One of my hypotheses is that the dissonance in Jung’s personality was a primary impetus in the innumerable new connections he made between psychology, mythology, and world religions. He had experienced a difficult childhood, and for this rea¬ son he was what Michael Whan has called a wounded healer (197). His intuitive insights, expressed in a rather abstract writing style, re¬ flect the close touch he had with his unconscious. He focused upon the modes that effect the inner transformation of the individual. For instance, when his close friend Richard Wilhelm returned from China with firsthand material on Chinese alchemy, what interested Jung was the similarity between Chinese and Western archetypal modes of transformation. According to Gerhard Adler, in Jung’s therapy with patients he was more interested in fostering healing, bringing the person into 2

The Wounded Jung

contact with the numinous or the dimension of otherness, than he was in “curing” neuroses. Process more than effect held the fascina¬ tion. Jung himself put this very succinctly in 1945 when he wrote to P. W. Martin: “The fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology” (Jung, Letters 1:377). In the scholarly literature, interpreters still disagree whether Jung’s father or his mother was for him the central figure. Some, like Murray Stein in his article “The Significance of Jung’s Father in His Destiny as a Therapist of Christianity” and in his book Jung’s Treat¬ ment of Christianity, have stressed the role of the father. My view is that Jung’s mother played a more formative role in his childhood than did his father. Clearly, both parents had positive and negative effects upon Jung. From each the negative effects predominated and set an agenda that was to engage him thoughout his life. His mother in par¬ ticular was an extremely flawed and divided personality. I will main¬ tain that his mother’s No. 1 and No. 2 Personalities are the underlying source of his own inner rift. At least some of the time, Jung’s mother was a figure of power for him in growing up. She was the more influential parental figure, and her presence or absence profoundly affected him. Jung experi¬ enced her absence from the home when he was three as abandon¬ ment. Unpublished materials at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine in Boston confirm the fact of his mother’s mental illness. Her absence, for hospitalization, at a crucial time in his personal de¬ velopment became one of his most formative early experiences. His stress upon the dreaded anima stemmed from her. Jung himself said that his father was reliable but powerless (Memories 8). As I shall at¬ tempt to demonstrate in what follows, both of his parents were to play vital roles in shaping his life and work, with his mother being in several respects the more important figure. Some interpreters, including several psychoanalysts, such as John Gedo, Harry Slochower, Leonard Shengold, Edwin Wallace, and Eli Marcovitz, have focused upon Jung’s childhood conflicts and the trauma of a sexual assault by an older man whom Jung says he wor¬ shiped. Other interpreters, such as Anthony Storr, D. W. Winnicott, and Jeffrey Satinover, have stressed the central role of Jung’s mother in his personality development. She, like Jung himself, possessed two personalities—a day personality and a night personality. One was Introduction

3

grounded in everyday experience, and the other in the archaic wis¬ dom of the centuries. Like Jung himself, she was interested in both the temporal and the eternal, the personal and the collective. I shall try to explore and extend the implications of this line of investiga¬ tion, which I find to be especially productive.

Jung Scholarship In recent years much new data have become available on the lives of Freud and Jung. In the case of Jung, we have his memoirs, Memo¬ ries, Dreams, Reflections, The Freud-Jung Letters, and the letters from 1906 to 1961 to add to his voluminous Collected Works. Many other documents from Jung’s life exist but are not available. For instance, only the tiniest fragments from his visionary diaries The Red Book and The Black Book have been made public. The full texts are still with¬ held from scholarly scrutiny by Jung’s heirs, because of their “private nature,” according to Aniela Jaffe (“Creative Phases” 174). Various letters and documents are also still confined to the Jung family safe. These include Jung’s important letter to Sabina Spielrein, written at a time of his personal involvement with her. I hope these will one day be released. A raft of biographies has appeared in the past two de¬ cades, but in my view this fairly extensive literature is less than com¬ pelling in many respects. Several of the biographies contradict one another on crucial points of interpretation. Even the more sustain¬ able interpretations are deficient on many details of Jung’s life. Most interpreters agree that it will be at least another thirty years before the definitive biography of Jung can be written. Jung’s intense personal crises, his relationships with women (hardly mentioned in Memories, Dreams, Reflections), interpretations of his correspondence with Freud and a host of others, his visions and fantasies, and his stature as a psychotherapist, cult figure, and religious guru are all under scrutiny. The task of sorting out the ma¬ terial available is not helped by the fact that Jung himself offers us a strange mixture of refreshing candor and evasiveness to the point of presenting a stylized, if not distorted, image of himself. The provisional state of information on Jung became apparent to me while reading transcripts of interviews with people familiar with the personal details of his life. From 1969 through 1972 Gene F. Nameche conducted 143 lengthy interviews, several of them multiple 4

The Wounded Jung

interviews, with a veritable who’s who of persons who worked with and knew Jung intimately. These interviews are located at the C. G. Jung Oral History Archive at the Countway Library. All of the inter¬ views conducted by Dr. Nameche were automatically restricted for ten years, even to qualified scholars. Twenty-one of these interviews are still restricted and will be for as much as another thirty years. Until these materials and those held by Jung’s heirs are released and studied by scholars, it will not be possible to form definitive con¬ clusions. We are reminded again that in Memories Jung revealed so much, yet so little! For the time being we have nothing even approximating an au¬ thoritative biography of Jung. Members of Jung’s family are said to like the volume by Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, but I believe it only perpetuates the romantic myth that Jung is a spiritual hero. Thomas W. Moore wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “it is comprehensive, well written and superbly translated. Unlike pre¬ vious biographies, it avoids psychoanalytic partisanship, but when Mr. Wehr leaves the safe path of factual detail for interpretation, problems appear” (22). In some ways it is impossible to assess Jung’s career fully until more has been disclosed. Paradoxes abound. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is a remarkable book, reluctantly writ¬ ten as a capstone to his life’s experience. It shows that he believed that his life was outwardly uneventful, though his accounts of his trips to distant places around the world, as to his beloved Bollingen, have enchanted the world. The heart of his life experience as he saw it consisted of inwardness, of dreams and visions.

The Task Begun in

Memories

Memories, Dreams, Reflections is a painfully inward memoir and dis¬ closes Jung’s inner feelings and images to the neglect of his interper¬ sonal relations. For instance, his wife, Emma, is hardly mentioned, and there is no mention at all of Toni Wolff.1 In several ways the book presents a stylized version of Jung’s life. Paradoxically, it both reveals and conceals much at the same time. Jung was both a public and a very private man. As a youth he loved solitude and kept many secrets from parents, friends, and associates, so it is not surprising that the same tendency is followed in his autobiography, written very late in Introduction

5

life when selective memory had become a factor. Much of what was disclosed in his 1961 autobiography came as a shock to those who knew him. From his erudite books one would never have been led to suspect what he revealed. Jung once asked himself: What myth do you live by? He replied that he was no longer able to live by the traditional Christian myth and would seek for a myth true to his inner experience. To his credit, he possessed a nonconventional form of spirituality and embarked on a nonconventional quest for meanings in life. To a large degree, how¬ ever, Jung himself has become a powerful myth for many persons. There is recognizable need for Jung’s interpreters to embark upon a new quest for the historical rather than the mythical Jung. Some have so “spiritualized” Jung that they have made him into a cultural hero, mythologized beyond all recognition. In Memories Jung clearly views himself as “the wise old man” (181). This Philemon image, which evolves out of an Elijah image, is for him an inner guide. It affords insight into the world of inner processes while devaluing those of the interpersonal realm. For the most part, however, the significant events evoking childhood feelings toward his parents are there for us to reflect upon. Some, such as the maneater dream (Memories 12), had been kept as lifelong secrets. Apart from some reminiscences of his father, with whom he never formed a strong positive identification, and his recollections of Freud (a flawed father figure), he does not discuss important relationships with men. Eugen Bleuler, his former chief at the Burgholzli, is only mentioned once in passing and then in a late chapter on travels. Women, we know, were terribly important to Jung. He once stated that he wanted to be remembered as a man who was a great lover.2 One would never guess this from reading his autobiography. Clearly, inner events were more important than external ones for him. But why must his reader be kept in the dark concerning so many of his relationships? In a sense, Jung’s life belongs to the public domain, for to a certain extent modern life reflects his vision of a person’s quest for integra¬ tion, the search for individuation, civilization in transition, and simi¬ lar themes. In “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” he wrote: “Modern man is an entirely new phenomenon. . . . He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens, and below

6

The Wounded Jung

him the whole of mankind with a history that disappears in the pri¬ meval mists. The modern man—or, let us say again, the man of the immediate present—is rarely met with, for he must be conscious to a superlative degree. . . . He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present” (Collected Works 10:74-75; hereinafter civ). To the extent that Jung’s vision was shaped by the events of his •> life, it is important, even crucial, that we understand the life forces that shaped those events. Perhaps by intention, the man and the myth that he and his followers presented are inextricably braided together. Both need to be seen and distinguished clearly. The question arises: Why did Jung reveal his inner feelings only to conceal the relation¬ ships that were so intimately related to those feelings? We cannot respond with certainty at this point, but it is important that eventu¬ ally the full story be told. At present, the man and his myth are still so intimately intertwined that it is in everyone’s interest that inter¬ pretations—partial portraits though they be—continue in the effort to correct one another. The great man had a dark side, and that story too must be told. At times he was excessively aggressive to the point of abrasiveness. Sometimes he was angry, even enraged. At still other times he was known to be extremely competitive, especially in his relationship with Freud. My own correspondence with Jung in i960 convinced me that far from being a plaster saint, he was, in Nietzsche’s words, “human, all too human.” At a time when Jung’s life and works have been overly romanticized, there is a particular need to insist that the story of the actual man be revealed. While working on my doctoral dissertation on Carl Jung and Martin Buber, I wrote to both men about their controversy over the eclipse of the divine, in the hope that some further clarification could be achieved concerning their disagreement in the German journal Merkur. Though both were advanced in years, they graciously an¬ swered my queries. However, when I asked Jung if he was a modern gnostic,” he took particular offense. I expected he would be objective and not take these issues personally. I was surprised to learn that in spite of outward appearances, he could be quite sensitive and exces¬ sively involved in defending what he had written. Only much later did I learn that the academic establishment had opposed his ideas throughout his life. In one of his letters to me, replying to my query

Introduction

7

asking whether he was a monologist, he likened himself in a rather strange way to John the Baptist, as one crying in the wilderness (Jung, Letters 2:571). Theoretical interpretations from Freudian and Jungian perspec¬ tives still differ, and no doubt such differences will persist. Con¬ cerning Jung’s personality structure and his basic conflicts and their resolution, however, the distance is beginning to narrow. One ques¬ tion that still exists is whether Jung was a dissident (Ernest Jones and Henri Ellenberger) or an originator from the start (the view of Marie-Louise von Franz). These are the orthodox extremes, and most investigators tend toward a middle view. My own judgment is that errors exist on both sides of psychology’s great chasm. Certainly Freud was incorrect when he perceived Jung to be a gentile Christian who would save psychoanalysis from its Jew¬ ish sectarianism. A pastor’s son does not automatically proceed from the same psychic assumptions as did his father. Jung didn’t. This is especially true when the father is unhappy and disillusioned with his vocation. It is by no means unusual for such a son to go to an opposite extreme in the search for his values. Jung himself frequently stated that it is the fate of children to live out the unlived and neglected side of their parents’ lives. This truth pertaining to perceived and actual psychic deflation or inflation became a central issue in his therapeu¬ tic method, which sought to restore a sense of psychic balance he was to term the coincidentia oppositorum.

Preview In my research for this book, my main task was to investigate the connection between Jung’s inner conflicts begun in childhood that continued into his mature years and the psychological, religious, and creative themes of his life. Part I deals with Jung’s formative and transformative life experiences. In the early chapters I will examine Jung’s relationships with his mother and his father (chapters 1 and 2), reflect upon several recent interpretations of his life, and offer inter¬ pretations of my own. Chapter 3 discusses the evidence of Jung’s inner conflicts and cre¬ ativity in his relationship with Freud. When Jung was amiable with Freud, Jung’s own creativity was relatively quiescent. Its emergence toward the end of the relation, with his writing of Symbols ofTransfor8

The Wounded Jung

mation, made the split with Freud inevitable. Their relationship ended abruptly when each man’s unconscious needs asserted themselves. Chapter 4 explores Jung’s descent into the unconscious. This period was initially devastating for Jung. Later he patiently worked through the emergence of disorienting forces. This creative en¬ counter with the explosive forces of the unconscious was to enable Jung, over time, to recover his equilibrium and to produce some of his most original and creative work. Here data from Jung’s 1925 Seminar Notes are considered. In these notes he mentions several items of importance that are omitted from his autobiography. Jung’s use of visionary exploration through such means as journal keeping, sand and oil painting, and active imagination allowed him eventually to come to terms with his unconscious and to resume an active and productive life. Chapter 5 focuses on Jung’s personal relationships with women, a subject almost totally absent from his autobiography. His relation¬ ship with his wife, Emma, is considered, as well as his long and per¬ sonally valuable relation with Toni Wolff. Following recent object relation theory, I will attempt to interpret the role of the feminine in his mature experience. Part II will demonstrate Jung’s lifelong exploration of a vision of life that largely reflected his own experience. His intellectual men¬ tors—Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—were divided selves, in many ways like himself. In ways reminiscent of the shamans of archaic society, he perceived and experienced many of the mental upheavals of modern man in search of a soul. To his credit, he both perceived and responded to the profound shift in sensibilities in modern times. Thus, he was to explore the parameters of a vision of inner healing or transformation that became a mode of therapy both for himself and for others. Part II discusses the ways Jung’s personal experience can be understood through his study of romantic literature and phi¬ losophy, his reassessment of religion as inner process as well as his fascination with gnosticism and alchemy, his reinterpretation of evil as a process to be integrated into human existence, and his attention to psychology as myth and the realization of selfhood. Chapter 6 analyzes Jung’s interest in and use of Goethe, Schopen¬ hauer, and Nietzsche. Interestingly, these figures, to whom he was especially drawn, experienced the world much as he did. Intuitively his method fostered visionary insight and inner illumination. Jung Introduction

9

wanted to find meaning in an individual life. More than almost any other psychiatrist or philosopher, he explored and exposited both philosophical and religious meaning throughout his writings. His was not a purely detached quest for knowledge but one based upon a life¬ long need to heal an inner rift. Chapter 7 examines the factors that determined his views on reli¬ gion. Religion was for Jung the intuitive psychotherapy of the ages. He was of two minds about religion. His investigations of the ar¬ chaic dimensions of religion—shamanism, gnosticism, and the ex¬ perience of the numinous—reflect a fruitful reliving and transform¬ ing of childhood trauma. Chapter 8 deals with the importance of myth for Jung. Some might say that myth became a lifelong preoccupation for him. Here I argue that his views on this topic need to be related to his child¬ hood experience. None of the many books on Jung do this satisfac¬ torily. By nurturing the unconscious, I assert, he gained insight into the nature of inner division (now commonly known as splitting) and thereby eventually achieved self-integration. Thus, Jung’s inner ex¬ periences were to determine the shape and direction of his creative explorations to a considerable degree. Chapter 9 is a discussion of the ways in which Jung fostered a creative encounter with the forces of the unconscious. Freud’s and Jung’s conceptions of creativity are considered, as well as the dif¬ ference between psychological and visionary creativity. Jung was a “wounded healer” who was able to tap the numinous dimension of human experience in ways that few pioneers of the psyche have been able to do. The process of symbolization became for Jung a means of creativity, inner healing, and integration. A short postscript summarizes the book’s findings and ties together several of the themes that run throughout the text. A glossary is ap¬ pended to assist those who may be unfamiliar with some of the terms used by Jung and Jungian specialists. Jung’s life and work are inextricably bound up with the problems and crises of modern consciousness that are deservedly given so much attention by thoughtful persons today. He was a thoroughly modern man, but one who was concerned with those processes that further the therapeutic dimension of consciousness in an age in which the dark shadow of nihilism drew near for many.

10

The Wounded Jung

PART ONE

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

There are powerful forces in whose grip mankind is helpless. —E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational In the adult, there is hidden a child—an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and that calls for unceasing care, attention, and fostering. This is the part of the personality that wishes to develop and complete itself. But the human being of our time is as far from completion as heaven is from earth.

— C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections

Mother No. i & Mother No. 2

Carl Jung was born in July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzer¬ land. Kesswil is a small village near Romanshorn on Lake Constance in eastern Switzerland and part of Canton Thurgau. His parents had come from Basel; thus the members of Jung’s family were known as Baslers. Six months after Jung’s birth, his parents moved a short distance to Laufen in Canton Zurich. Later still they moved to the village of Klein-Hiiningen, near Basel. His father, Johann Paul Achilles Jung (1842-96), was a Protes¬ tant pastor. He had been trained as a philologist at the university but had been unable to secure an academic position. Hence he became the minister to a series of small country parishes. Living in drafty r3

parsonages made an indelible mark on the younger Jung’s life. When Jung was exploring the possibilities for a vocation, his father said, “Be anything you like except a theologian” (Memories 75). The senior Jung desired something better for his son than he had for himself. Jung’s mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung (1848-1923), was born in Basel and came from a long and distinguished line of Protestant clergy. She was the youngest daughter of the famed antistes of Basel, Samuel Preiswerk (1799-1871). (In the Swiss Reformed Church the antistes functioned as an authoritative leader of the parish.) Her mother, Augusta Faber, was descended from French Protestants. Emilie’s father was first a pastor in Muttenz and later taught Hebrew and Old Testament in a theological seminary. He was recognized as a celebrated scholar on biblical matters and authored a text on Hebrew grammar. Carl Jung’s father met his future wife in the home of Samuel Preiswerk while pursuing his own interest in Hebrew grammar. Aniela Jaffe recites an anecdote describing how Jung’s grandfather Samuel Preiswerk reserved a special chair in his study for the ghost of his deceased first wife, Magdalene. Each week he would hold inti¬ mate conversations with the ghost of Magdalene, to the dismay and distress of his second wife, Augusta. Pastor Preiswerk, though he was a highly learned man, gifted in writing poetry, believed he was con¬ stantly surrounded by ghosts. Jung explained that his mother sat be¬ hind her father when he wrote his sermons, presumably to frighten away the ghosts. “He could not bear the thought of ghosts passing be¬ hind his back and disturbing him while he studied. If a living person sat behind him, he believed the ghosts were frightened away” (cited in Jaffe, “Details” 40). Samuel Preiswerk, then, was a visionary given to “conversations with spirits” (A. Oeri, cited in G. Wehr 17). Jung’s maternal grandmother, Augusta, was also thought to be endowed with extrasensory perception. In fact, on both his mother’s and his father’s sides, Jung’s family was steeped in beliefs concerning the power and influence of supernatural forces. Jung’s mother especially, as we will see, continued in the visionary tradition of her forebears. Growing up, and even in later years, Jung himself was to take his own particular stance with regard to voices, visions, and the belief in spirit power that had been part of his family’s perceptions for generations. Recent scholarship has focused in a variety of ways upon what can be learned of Jung’s childhood experience. The main source of in14

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

formation on his life has been his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In many ways it is a remarkable book, for in the pro¬

cess of writing Memories Jung experienced “long-submerged images of childhood” (vi). It especially reflects his inner feelings and plays down his interpersonal relations, which in his view were hardly worth recounting. Memories itself leaves much room for analysis and interpretation.

Jung frequently expressed his distaste for exposing his life to pub¬ lic view, but in old age he reluctantly agreed to write his life story. Between 1957 and 1961 he wrote the early chapters and dictated the later chapters to his secretary, Aniela JafFe. As in all autobiographies, selective memory affected Jung’s narrative. That is to say, Jung em¬ phasized precisely what fit into the image of his life he wanted to convey. In addition, the manuscript was further edited at the behest of family members who wanted certain elements toned down and others eliminated. Jung was a solitary and unhappy youth given to periods of fitful introspection and private rituals that provided him with solace. His parents’ marriage was an unhappy affair marked by prolonged sepa¬ rations and periodic mental illness. Clearly Jung’s childhood was a critical period of intense inner conflict that persisted in some ways throughout his life. Several independent but convergent lines of in¬ vestigation largely agree on the general picture of the conflicts that Jung encountered. My task will be to focus upon and draw out the main lines of Jung’s primary relationships in the formative period of his life. I will argue that Jung was a “wounded healer” whose explora¬ tions into the psyche were part of his creative effort to find wholeness and integration.

Jung's Distrust of a Twofold Mother In an abbreviated account of Jung’s life, Anthony Storr has called attention to the way in which Jung was mother-oriented: “Jung’s mother is described by him as problematical, and also inconsistent, in that she sometimes expressed conventional opinions which another, unconventional part of herself proceeded to contradict; so that the boy early recognized that she did not always say what she really meant, and thus was a divided person” (C. G. Jung, 2). Storr’s point is that Jung developed an ambivalent attitude toward his mother. She Mother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

x5

embodied the images of woman as devourer and destroyer as well as protector. This internalized ambivalence provided the basis for a deep distrust of women in general. We shall see that in his youth Jung was greatly occupied with the task of extricating himself from the untoward influence of his own mother. For Jung the central figure of his formative experience was in¬ deed the mother. Jung himself says: “She always seemed to me the stronger of the two” (Memories 25). If his perception is accurate, we need to be very clear about what kind of mother Emilie was. In this respect Memories could not be clearer in its broad brush strokes. Jung presents the reader with several examples of his mother’s twofold nature. He writes: There was an enormous difference between my mother’s two per¬ sonalities. That was why as a child I often had anxiety dreams about her. By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear’s cave. Archaic and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. At such moments she was the embodiment of what I have called the “natural mind.” I, too, have this archaic nature, and in me it is linked with the gift—not always pleasant—of seeing people and things as they are. (50) Jung tells us that in many respects his mother was very good to him. She embodied a sense of charm and magnetism, was a marvelous cook, and provided an enjoyable ambience in the home. He describes her as a portly person in her mature years, both a good listener and an engaging conversationalist: “Her chatter was like the gay plashing of a fountain.... She held all the conventional opinions a person was obliged to have, but then her unconscious personality would suddenly put in an appearance. That personality was unexpectedly powerful: a somber, imposing figure possessed of unassailable authority—and no bones about it” (48). He continues: “I was sure that she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny. The other emerged only now and then, but each time it was unex¬ pected and frightening. She would then speak as if talking to herself, but what she said was aimed at me and usually struck to the core of my being, so that I was stunned into silence” (49). Or again “there came moments when her second personality burst

16

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

forth, and what she said on those occasions was so true and to the point that I trembled before it” (52). Jung’s mother’s personality was marked by a profound dichotomy. He recognized that she did not always say what she really meant and was a divided person. What Jung himself did not openly acknowledge or emphasize is that it was pre¬ cisely this ambivalence and inner inconsistency that he himself came to internalize. Numerous interpreters of Jung, preoccupied with his esoteric symbolism, abstract archetypal formulations, and theoreti¬ cal conjectures, have overlooked this most important point. Jung tells us that his parents did not communicate very well with each other, and like many in a religious vocation they exhibited a public demeanor far different from the bad temper frequently shown at home. Jung writes: “My mother usually assumed I was mentally far beyond my age, and she would talk to me as a grown-up. It was plain to see that she was telling me everything she could not say to my father, for she early made me her confidant and confided her troubles to me” (51-52). Paul Stern has written: “The figure of the mother would undoubtedly have appeared less demonic to the boy if her ener¬ gies, languishing in her marriage, had not focused too exclusively on him, her oldest surviving—and for nine years, her only—child” (25).

Maternal Absence Experienced as Abandonment In Memories Jung refers to dim intimations of trouble in his par¬ ents’ marriage that hovered around him (8). Difficulties in the mar¬ riage are only part of the matter. His mother’s hospitalization for several months in 1878, when he was three years of age, was to affect him profoundly. He felt abandoned. This was also the beginning of an “anima” projection upon a dark-haired maid who cared for him during his mother’s absence. In the first draft of Memories, with its penciled and penned addi¬ tions and deletions, Jung indicated some of the circumstances sur¬ rounding his mother’s hospitalization in Basel. He explained that she was hysterical from disappointment with her husband, whose life took a turn for the worse after his final examinations at the Univer¬ sity. In the original version of his autobiography, Jung had included even more details of his mother’s mental aberrations, but other family members, fearing these would tarnish the family image, insisted that

Mother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

17

they be removed.1 A crucial sentence that was omitted stated that his mother only recovered her health after his father passed away.2 (By that time Jung was twenty-one years of age.) During the period of his mother’s absence he developed somatic problems, such as a case of generalized eczema. Jung writes: “My illness, in 1878, must have been connected with a temporary sepa¬ ration of my parents. My mother spent several months in a hospital in Basel. . . . An aunt of mine, who was a spinster and some twenty years older than my mother, took care of me. I was deeply troubled by my mother’s being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken.” (In a sentence edited out of the final version of Memories, Jung spoke of fearing still another separa¬ tion from his mother.) Here we have a key to understanding his core personality: “The feeling I associated with ‘woman’ was for a long time that of innate unreliability. ‘Father,’ on the other hand, meant reliability but powerlessness” (Memories 8). Jung candidly tells us that the play and counterplay between what he terms his own Personalities No. 1 and No. 2 ran throughout his entire lifetime (45). He insists that his experience of dual person¬ alities has nothing to do with a split or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. But is he to be taken seriously in this regard? Quite amazingly, he argues that this same phenomenon is played out in the life of every individual. This shows, I think, how conditioned he was by his own unique childhood experiences. He assumed that others shared his experiences. Jung explains to the reader of Memories that his No. 1 Personality gave him a place in time, but that Personality No. 2 provided a sense of the imperishable, of peace and solitude, and was of supreme im¬ portance. In his view this latter personality is what related him to the eternal and archetypal dimension of existence. Jung confesses: “Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hardworking, decent and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up—old, in fact—skeptical, mis¬ trustful, remote from the world of men but close to nature . . . and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever ‘God’ worked directly in him” (44-45). Again we are made to understand that his No. 1 Personality was the schoolboy of 1890. “Besides his world there

18

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

existed another realm” where lived the “Other,” who knew the divine as a hidden, personal, and at the same time suprapersonal secret (45). Much in Jung’s account of his childhood reappears indirectly in his theories. His extreme loneliness surfaces as introversion. His early interest in secrets becomes a lifelong fascination with spirit power. His identification with his mother permits an unusual attention to archetypal dreams and the fantasy life. Many of these form the basis of his later teachings, almost unique in the history of psychology but quite pertinent to the study of mystical religious phenomena. For Jung, the reappropriation of the maternal was linked to the expres¬ sion of the creative. Achieving psychic security became a first priority for Jung as a youth, since he needed to deal with his mother’s unreliability and changing moods. One of the ways he did this was through private rituals that he thought would effect magical results. These dramatic enactments certainly compensated for feelings of isolation and in¬ adequacy. At times he would make a fire in the garden and establish a particular and unique relationship with it. For instance, in the inter¬ stices of the wall surrounding the family garden Jung would tend a little fire with the assistance of other children. Jung seems to have played a central role in the childhood ritual of fire building, directing his peers in their assigned roles. His fire was maintained by united efforts of wood gathering. But he insisted that he was the only one allowed to tend this particular fire. Others could tend other fires, but these were “profane,” whereas his fire was sacred and living (Memo¬ ries 20). His imagination led him to engage in a visionary experience

with the fire so that it would “burn forever.” Doubtless this ritual gave him enhanced social status among his peers, a sense of selfimportance, and a sense of unity with nature. Or again he would sit on a stone in the garden and wonder: “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” (Memories 20) These statements have parallels in the history of religious philosophy. For instance, there is Chuang-tzu’s puzzle¬ ment about whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. The curious ambivalence of what is Self and what is Other in Jung’s childhood stems from the inner need for security in an alien and aloof environment. It is significant that Jung himself relates these rituals to an inner

Mother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

19

split and mentions that cherishing his secret relationship with these objects offered him much security. Years later at his Bollingen re¬ treat, Jung would, upon arising, customarily greet and talk with the utensils by which he cooked his meals over an open fire.3 He referred to them as his “friends.”

Winnicott’s Interpretation of Jung's Childhood One of the most discerning and provocative lines of analysis of Jung’s childhood is to be found in D. W. Winnicott’s brief review of Memories that appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis

in 1964. As a pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, Winnicott devotes himself entirely to the first 115 pages of Memories, which he asserts are genuine autobiography and should be required reading for all psychoanalysts. Winnicott states that Jung in describing himself, gives us a picture of childhood schizo¬ phrenia, and at the same time his personality displays a strength of a kind which enabled him to heal himself. At cost he recovered, and part of the cost to him is what he paid out to us, if we can listen and hear, in terms of his exceptional insight. Insight into the feelings of those who are mentally split. I must ask the reader at this stage to understand

that I am not running down Jung by labeling him a “recovered case of infantile psychosis.” (450; emphasis added) Winnicott claims that Jung’s psychic illness and the defenses that were to serve him so well were established by the age of four. From extensive experience as a psychoanalyst and from a close reading of Memories, he maps out Jung’s childhood illness as follows: healthy

potential but an infancy disturbed by maternal depression. This was counteracted by his father’s motherliness. By the time Jung was four years of age, the main defensive organization of the personality was in place (452). Winnicott indicates that Jung’s personality defenses include the emergence of a secret True Self (termed by Jung Personality No. 2) and the False Self (according to Jung’s usage, Personality No. 1). Finally, the forging of a lifework proceeds out of this defense organi¬ zation, along with a permanent tendency to heal the split. Through¬ out his writings Winnicott uses the concept of a True and a False Self 20

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

to refer to a split that originated in a failed relationship, in flawed bonding between mother and infant in the earliest stages. Given a general formulation of psychoanalytic theory and the circumstances of Jung’s childhood, several points emerge. To para¬ phrase and to some degree extend Winnicott’s line of reasoning: 1) Jung spent his life looking for his own self, which he never really found, since he remained to some extent split (except insofar as this split was healed in his work on his autobiography). He spent his life looking for a place to keep his inner psychic reality, although the task was an impossible one. By the age of four he had incorpo¬ rated into his psyche the sophisticated and frightening concept of the underground man-eater dream, closely associated in his case with the burial of the dead. In Winnicott’s words, “He went down under and found subjective life” (453). 2) At the same time Jung became a withdrawn person. From this developed his exploration of the unconscious, and his concept of the collective unconscious was part of his attempt to deal with his lack of contact with what could now be called the unconscious according to Freud. This gives the idea of Jung’s work being out of touch with instinct and object relations except in a subjective sense. 3) Jung’s extroverted False Self (No. 1) gave him a place in the world and a rich family and professional life, but Jung makes no bones about his preference for his True Self (No. 2), which for him carried the sense of the real. 4) It is not possible to conceive of a repressed unconscious with a split mind; instead, what is found is dissociation. The only place for Jung’s unconscious in the Freudian sense would be in his secret True Self. 5) Jung was threatened by an ego disintegration (a depersonaliza¬ tion), a reversal of the maturational processes settled down into a splitting of the personality, related on one level to the parental sepa¬ ration. 6) There is, according to Winnicott, evidence of maternal depres¬ sion that affected Jung’s infancy and provided the negative for the positive qualities that he projected onto the landscape, onto things, and onto the world. 7) For Jung there is no evidence of a direct clash with the father in extrovert living. Jung’s father became the reliable but powerless mother figure in his life. Mother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

21

8) Whatever Freud was, he had a unitary personality. Jung was dif¬ ferent. He knew truths that are unavailable to most men and women. Jung was especially concerned with intuitive and mystical ways of knowing that are inaccessible to many. 9) In old age he appears to have dropped his No. 1 Personality to a large extent and to have lived by his True Self. This observation is substantiated by Jung’s autobiography, where in later years the per¬ sona is dropped. He gave thorough attention to issues of the second half of life, such as developing a religious attitude, meditation, soli¬ tude, and death. He especially enjoyed the solitude afforded by Bollingen, where he had the opportunity to think through so many of his creative ideas. An increasing number of psychiatrists from differing perspectives seem to concur with the main thrust of Winnicott’s analysis of Jung as a recovered split personality. These include Joseph Wheelwright, John W. Perry, Jeffrey Satinover, Michael Fordham, and John Gedo — all highly respected therapists. As Peter Homans puts it, “One might expect that on this point, more than any other, Freudians and Jungians would find ample reason to disagree; but such is not the case” (Jung in Context 87). For instance, Fordham, a British thera¬ pist, tells of Jung’s asking him what he thought after he had read the first draft of the childhood chapters of the autobiography. Fordham replied that Jung had been “a schizophrenic child, with strong ob¬ sessional defenses, and that had he been brought to me I should have said the prognosis was good, but that I should have recommended analysis—He did not contest my blunt statement” (“Memories and Thoughts” 109). As I am not a psychiatrist, my own concern is not that of identify¬ ing and diagnosing Jung’s childhood psychopathology. Rather, I hope to achieve a clearer focus on Jung’s primary parental relationships and their impact upon his writings in general. Winnicott’s analysis seems to offer one such explanation that provides greater internal coherence to Jung’s discussion of his own and his mother’s No. 1 and No. 2 Personalities. Winnicott does not directly address the extent to which Jung’s prodigious creativity and creative imagination are related to his inner conflicts. He does, however, allude to Jung’s insights into his own dis¬ sociation. Also, Winnicott does not explicitly say that he views them as a creative resolution of the conflict of opposites or dissonance. In 22

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

my view, claiming the latter would seem to follow indirectly from Winnicott’s analysis and to be a warranted conclusion.

Other Analyses In a penetrating analysis entitled “Jung’s Lost Contribution to the Dilemma of Narcissism,” Jeffrey Satinover, past president of the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York, has expressed his general agree¬ ment with Winnicott’s assessment of Jung’s personality structure (416). Satinover has shown that Jung was primarily concerned with “the personality-like character of... split-off portions of the psyche, with their consequent will-like autonomy” (411). Using the work of Homans, Stern, and Winnicott and a large measure of originality to make his case, Satinover shows how Jung’s theories can be “taken not as hypotheses but as symptoms” (415) and how mother images can come to “dominate fantasies of fragmentation” (423). He also shows how widespread the phenomenon of splitting is, calling attention, as does John Gedo, a Chicago psychoanalyst, to Jung’s successful adap¬ tation. A tacit but undeveloped connection with Jung’s own visionary creativity would seem to be implied. That is to say, Jung’s method of amplification of unconscious images through visual imagination was a mode of self-healing that was also successfully used with countless patients by him and others. Satinover states that the content of psychotic, or near psychotic ideation may be understood as a depiction of the fragmenting self and of the psyche’s attempt at restoration. In his view, “the symp¬ toms of an ‘illness’ arise from an attempt at self cure” (423). Dis¬ cussing the theories that Jung formulated following his self-cure, Satinover states: “As a consequence of the regression into a nurturant phase, mother imagos (split into the ‘Great Mother’ and the Terrible Mother’) dominate fantasies of fragmentation. Jung focused many of his mythological researches on the stories of the dying and resur¬ recting hero-gods that figure prominently in primitive cultures and in Christianity. . . . These god figures are usually the sons of good and bad mother goddesses” (423). In another article on the same issue, Satinover writes: “While Jung’s pathology was probably within the psychotic spectrum, broadly conceived, it does not appear to have been nearly so severe as what today we would call childhood schizophrenia ( At the Mercy Mother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

23

of Another” 64). In this insightful article Satinover follows and ex¬ pands on Winnicott’s earlier review of Memories with the above clarification. Further, both Winnicott and Satinover agree that the psychotic symptoms are not the illness but the psyche’s attempt to restore health. Jung in Modern Perspective, edited by Renos K. Papadopoulos and

Graham S. Saayman, also has a bearing on this topic. To this volume Papadopoulos contributes “Jung and the Concept of the Other.” He calls attention to Jung’s emphasis that “the play and counterplay be¬ tween personalities No. 1 and No. 2” has “run throughout my whole life” and that their interrelationship and dialogue offered him his profoundest experiences, “on the one hand a bloody struggle, and on the other supreme ecstasy” (Memories 45, 48). Early on, Jung established a second, an Other, personality within himself whose contribution he valued sincerely. Papadopoulos calls attention to Jung’s experience of “disunion” with and alienation from himself: “The influence of this wider world, this world which contained others besides my parents, seemed to me dubious if not altogether suspect and, in some obscure way, hostile” (Memories 19). To alleviate the fear and insecurity that these states produced in the childhood world of imagination, Jung found ways of healing that “split” and reestablished his “inner security,” which was threatened (Memories 19-23).

Papadopoulos offers an exceedingly comprehensive study of Per¬ sonalities No. 1 and No. 2 throughout Jung’s life. Rather strangely, he largely ignores the role of Jung’s mother as one who shaped his per¬ sonality, except to comment that “since that Other was now located within, Jung was no longer a lonely, frightened boy, but had the re¬ sources to heal his condition of ‘disunity’ and ‘alienation’ ” (Papa¬ dopoulos and Saayman 59). In addition, he began observing similar divisions in other people. This made him aware of the complexities of human personality, and he ceased to see people in unidimensional, childish divisions of good and bad. As a first step, he distinguished his own mother’s No. 2 Personality. To some extent the review by Winnicott and the article by Papa¬ dopoulos complement one another, for Winnicott is concerned with Jung’s early childhood experience while Papadopoulos specifically introduces the importance of Jung’s secrets and traces the motif of the two personalities throughout Jung’s life. In another sense, the 24

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

two writings offer a contrast of interpretation. Papadopoulos seems to follow much more closely (and accept as true) Jung’s own con¬ tention that all persons have a consciousness of a Personality No. 2 (a True Self). This contention differs markedly from Winnicott’s notion of the unitary self versus the divided self. According to Papadopoulos, it also gradually dawned on Jung that since Personality No. 2 was of an impersonal, timeless, cosmic nature, by implication all people had one. Then all people were in a sense connected through a transpersonal eternal realm. One can doubt Jung’s assumption and ask: Do all persons have a No. 2 Personality as Jung’s mother had and as he later had? Why does it necessarily follow that a No. 2 Personality is timeless, impersonal, and archetypal rather than finite, personal, and conditioned? A developmentally grounded analysis has no need to postulate a transpersonal eternal realm in its mode of explanation. The facts in the case provide reasons enough. Winnicott has expressed it well: “Generally the problems of life are not about the search for a self, but about the full and satisfying use of a self that is a unit and is well grounded” (review 455).

/

Jung's Mother and His Own No. 2 Personality In growing up, Jung had two perceptions of his mother: First, she

was unreliable in that she was hospitalized during at least one criti¬ cal period of his youth. Second, she was unreliable in such a way that he could not take what she said at face value. He writes: “I was about eleven years old when she informed me of a matter that con¬ cerned my father and alarmed me greatly.” He went to tell an influ¬ ential person about the incident. When Jung called at the door of this man, he was told by the maid that the man was out. Upon his re¬ turn home, his mother told him an altogether different version of the story. He tells us that thereupon his confidence in his mother came to be strictly limited: “I decided to divide everything my mother said by two” (Memories 52). Jung’s mother’s No. 2 Personality was “possessed” by what may be called the features of “primitive” spirituality. I am struck by the way in which, in his youth, Jung over time internalized several of the fea¬ tures of his mother’s No. 2 Personality. Her “night personality” in particular evoked in him numinous feelings of both terror and fasci¬ nation. Some of the feelings we can note in Jung’s mother are shaMother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

25

manic certainty connected with inner spiritual power (“That person¬ ality was unexpectedly powerful” [Memories 48]); pagan spirituality connected with the earth and the erotic (“She had a hearty animal warmth” [48]); and moments of religious ecstasy, mystic illumina¬ tion, and visionary insight (“Deeply awed by my mother’s excite¬ ment, I withdrew penitently . . . and began playing with my bricks” [49]). His mother’s mystic feelings apparently alternated with other feelings of distress, pain, and agony. Finally, she was tactless. In par¬ ticular, she at times spoke in a blunt manner without regard to con¬ sequence. “But then came the moments when her second personality would burst forth, and what she said on those occasions was so true and to the point that I trembled before it” (52). On balance we can see that Jung’s was a difficult, even terrify¬ ing mother, at times. Of the period after his mother’s return to the home following her hospitalization, Jung speaks quite candidly of the anxiety she repeatedly caused him. “That is why as a child I often had anxiety dreams about her” (Memories 50). For Jung, anxiety was frequently mixed with depression: “Later my mother told me that in those days I was often depressed” (42). These and similar episodes resulted in psychosomatic illnesses, including generalized eczema, which impaired his functioning. Thus it would seem that Jung was more profoundly affected by his mother’s behavior toward him than his autobiography would initially lead us to believe. We can further observe that Jung’s second “personality” was very much like his mother’s No. 2 Personality. The No. 2 Personality in Jung and his mother related to the nocturnal, the realm of nature, and the esoteric as well as the numinous and uncanny aspects of experience. Of himself Jung writes: “The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me” (Memories 358). It is quite possible that many of the features of his mother’s split personality became in¬ corporated into his own youthful perception of the world. If we accept the main features of Winnicott’s explanation of Jung’s childhood development, it would seem to follow that Jung’s mother was a divided self in much the same way that he was. Each in turn saw and experienced numinous realities that others did not. They both also possessed shamanic powers of influence and persuasion that were used with considerable effect upon others. Jung’s sense of numinosity seems to emerge, at least to some extent, from the contact he had with his mother’s No. 2 Personality. Jung refers to the times when 26

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

her second personality would “burst forth” {Memories 52). There is no doubt that he found this side of her “both unexpected and fright¬ ening” (49) because of her inconsistent nature. Both Jung and his mother tended to personify aspects of the self. Frequently in his auto¬ biography he refers to the ruthlessness of his mother’s No. 2 Person¬ ality. But he too, as he acknowledges at the end of Memories (356), could be utterly ruthless at times. Jungian analysts have used the term mana personality to refer to the extraordinary and compelling power that emanates from certain individuals. Andrew Samuels in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analy¬ sis points out that since Jung’s death, studies of transitional states

confirm that during liminal periods or borderline states, a person such as an initiate, novice, patient, or analysand is particularly sus¬ ceptible to attraction by so-called mana personalities. The term mana personality refers to “the presence of an all-pervading vital force,

a primal source of growth or magical healing that can be likened to a primitive concept of psychic energy” (Samuels, Critical Dictio¬ nary 89). As people often believe that such a figure has attained a

higher state of consciousness, they are confident that they can make the needed transition in the person’s presence. Jung gives attention to being “grasped” by spirit power, being in the grip of the daimonic. “There was a daimon in me.... It overpow¬ ered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon” {Memories 356). Or again, “I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?” (357). An inconsistency occasioned by a change of perspective is one thing; one manifesting inner dissociation is quite another. Given Jung’s childhood deprivation, restoration of the maternal imago became a lifelong preoccupation. Jung pursued this in sym¬ bolic ways, through formulating theories such as anima/animus, by writing books on self-integration, and through his interpersonal re¬ lationships. The quest was most likely traced out in his relations with Emma, Toni Wolff, and Sabina Spielrein and in the maternal aspects of his theories. Jung was to write extensively on both the mother complex and the psychological aspects of the mother archetype. Perhaps one reason for this focus was the pain his mother caused him in his growing up, Mother No. 1 & Mother No. 2

27

as well as her lengthy absence from the home at an early and critical juncture of his childhood. It is clear that he distanced himself from his mother in a variety of ways. Because of difficulties in his par¬ ents’ marriage and a lack of true communication between them, his mother frequently spoke to him as one would to an adult and lav¬ ished undue attention on him. In effect, more was demanded of Jung than could reasonably be expected given his age. Ruth Bailey, Jung’s housekeeper for many years, shared some of Jung’s memories of his mother: “She used to have . . . mental aber¬ rations, she would go shopping for one thing and come home with another. That used to amuse him very much but exasperate him at the same time because it was a waste of money. She would go [look¬ ing] for something like a dish cloth and come home with a netting to keep the birds off, something vaguely connected but quite the wrong thing.”4 Jung’s theories repeatedly speak of the archetypal aspects of the Great Mother. The personal pain caused by his real mother was too close for him to speak of directly, even in later years. We can suppose that many of the qualities Jung observed in a rather ambivalent fashion in his mother may have found their way into his unconscious, into his writings, and even into his interper¬ sonal expectations. It should not seem too far-fetched to assume that he would seek at least some of these qualities in his relations with sig¬ nificant others. We will have occasion to explore this topic in greater detail in chapter 5.

New Directions in Jung Research Some of the most promising research on Jung’s life lies in journal articles that are relatively inaccessible to the general public. These offer reinterpretations of Jung’s relationships with his parents. Winnicott’s object relations theory, expounded at length in his numerous writings, holds that the innate growth potential of a child is expressed in a variety of spontaneous manifestations. At the stage when fantasies are a necessary part of the growth process, an ordi¬ nary good mother responds to the child with gestures of trust and reassurance. Hence, bonding occurs. Thus the conformity between the child’s experience and the mother’s response gives to the former an omnipotent, creative quality. Repeated experiences of this kind establish in the infant a sense of wholeness, of conviction about the 28

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

goodness of reality, and a belief in the world as a rewarding place. This core of feeling gives rise to a True Self because of its full maturational potential. Although Winnicott does not elaborate on the connection be¬ tween his general theory and Jung’s experience, it is interesting to speculate how he might have done so. It appears that Jung’s mother did not establish a relation of sufficient trust with her child, so that his fantasies became incorporated into his No. z Personality. While still struggling to deal with the outer world, he partly withdrew from it and became introverted, finding refuge in an internal fantasy world. This has been described by object relations theorists as a problem not of impulse control but rather of ego splitting. Hence Jung’s flawed childhood relation with his mother led him into a quest for the real¬ ization of creativity as a mode of self-healing throughout the many decades of his life. While this point is impossible to verify with cer¬ tainty, it would seem to be developmentally rooted. Several object relations theorists have shown that confidence in one’s mother is established through basic trust and permits the grad¬ ual giving up of feelings of omnipotence. This involves necessary disillusionment as well as mood swings between intense love and hate. Frustration beyond a certain level cannot be contained within the affective cohesion of the experiences of the True Self. Negative experience gradually becomes organized to form a False Self. According to a study by Berta Rank and Dorothy MacNaughton, one of the impediments to a successful synthesis of the various com¬ ponents of the personality is the absence of a stable mother image. Arnold Modell makes the similar point that the child who has been separated from the mother may resort to magical thinking for the purpose of uniting with the lost love object. Feelings of omnipotence combined with strategies of magical thinking counteract feelings of helplessness. Early loss of a parent for a time is known to affect self¬ idealization patterns and give great impetus to ambitious and creative personality patterns. All of this would seem to apply to Jung’s child¬ hood. Only a very few interpreters have commented on Jung’s mother’s split personality. Satinover, in an all-too-short article titled “Jung’s Relation to the Mother,” has remarked on the ways in which Jung’s mother was “rarely soothing and caring, but instead was mostly in¬ trusive and, more specifically, phallic. By ‘phallic’ I mean to convey Mother No. i & Mother No. 2

z9

everything that the term suggests with respect to personality, from what we mean when we speak vulgarly of someone as a ‘prick’ to what we mean when we compliment someone with ‘a seminal mind.’ . . . Jung speaks of his mother as having, like himself, a ‘number one’ and a ‘number two’ personality” (16). Further, Satinover makes the point that Jung’s experience of his mother was later transformed into his experience and concept of the anima: “The anima as Jung described it was powerful (phallic) and potentially castrating (viz. Jung’s Salome, whose beautiful namesake had the head of John the Baptist. . . .). Likewise Jung regarded the phallic aspect of women (the animus) with the same mixture of fascination, suspicion, and wariness with which he responded to his own mother” (17-18). This is all to the point. Contrary to outward appearances of warm¬ heartedness and joviality, Jung’s mother did not present him with the consistent image of a warm and nurturing person. Rather, her in¬ trusive ways of acting produced an attitude of caution and suspicion on Jung’s part. Dual feelings of fascination and wariness are exactly what Rudolf Otto meant when he described numinous feelings that contain the dual aspects of dread and ecstasy. Brilliant as Satinover’s discussion is in some respects, on the cru¬ cial issue he equivocates. Seemingly he wants to have it both ways, explaining in detail a developmental conception of Jung’s mother while at the same time alluding to an archetypal understanding of “the mother.” Moreover, what Satinover does not explain to us is how Jung’s reenactment of his mother’s split and her emotions (which we see replicated in Jung himself) are related to Jung’s own view of reli¬ gious and creative images. Throughout the pages that follow, I shall attempt to trace many of these connections. That is to say, already in Jung’s childhood we have the primary data for his later notions of the healing functions of the numinous, the power of the daimon, and the sources of his spiritual journey into the self as attempts to heal the rifts within the inner man. It is becoming increasingly clear that Jung’s extraordinary cre¬ ativity stemmed in large measure from his childhood conflicts, which until the publication of Memories were unrecognized. Even there the true nature of Jung’s conflicts is disguised to a considerable degree. As Winnicott puts it, emotional illness “may not only give a person a lot of trouble but push that person on to exceptional attainment” (review 455). Creative work itself is an attempted resolution (never 3°

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

complete) of internalized inner conflict. The creative person is more conscious of an alien will beyond his or her comprehension. This is what has been termed by Jung an autonomous complex and is a detached portion of the psyche that leads an independent life. The reconciliation of opposites, a theme so often recited in Jung’s work, would seem to embody the element of coming to terms with uncon¬ scious contents that need to be reunited into the larger frame of con¬ sciousness. Dissociation, for all its difficulties, has its positive value as a spur to creativity.

Mother No. i & Mother No. z

31

Be anything you like except a theologian. —Johann Paul Achilles Jung, quoted in C. G. Jung,

Memories My memory of my father is of a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas wound, a ufisher king” whose wound would not heal. —

C. G. Jung, Memories

The Personal & Mythic Father

Jung s father was a man whose primary frustration was that Christian symbols no longer mediated psychic power. Jung found his father s concealed religious despair a source of frustration and consternation. His father had lost the innocence of childlike faith but nonetheless tenaciously held to Christian doctrine. Belief was for him a shallow anchor, not a rock or ground of sustenance or renewal. Jung’s father was trained as a linguist and took a doctorate in Ori¬ ental languages at Gottingen University. During his years as a pastor of small churches, he often smoked a pipe, as he had done in his uni¬ versity days. A possible interpretation of this action is that in fantasy he wished to return to his earlier years as a student. According to 32

Jung’s account, “His days of glory had ended with his final exami¬ nation. ... As a country parson he lapsed into a sort of sentimental idealism and into reminiscences of his golden student days, continued to smoke a long student’s pipe, and discovered that his marriage was not all he imagined it to be” (.Memories 91). In important respects it is apparent that Jung’s father failed to develop inwardly in new direc¬ tions once he entered the parish ministry. His inner defenses seem to have precluded this. In fact, one might say that the rest of his life went downhill. As Murray Stein puts it: “Jung later held Christianity partly accountable for his father’s plight, but held his father account¬ able as well” (“Significance” 24). Toward his father Jung had feelings based on reliability and ten¬ derness, for as a lad his father sang songs to soothe him. Because of his mother’s absence at crucial points of his youth, it is understand¬ able that his father adopted attitudes of motherliness toward him. His father would sing the comforting words: “Alles schweige, jeder neige” (Memories 8). This means something like “Everything is quiet and peaceful, each one bows low.” Even in his later years Jung re¬ called his father’s compassionate singing to him as a small child in the middle of the night. At the same time, his father was filled with anger over being trapped in the role of upholder of church doctrines through the means of blind belief. The father is generally the source of ego and superego development. It would seem that Jung did not sufficiently identify with his father, whom he perceived as ineffectual. When the time came for him to consider a vocation, his father told him, “Be anything you like except a theologian” (Memories 75). Thus, his child¬ hood ambition, like that of countless youngsters, was to surpass his father in a host of ways. He had no desire to emulate his father, for he was only too well aware of the ways that church and religion had be¬ come a straitjacket that had thwarted his father’s inner development.

Early Childhood Myths From his childhood days Jung fantasized about Jesus. He was torn between what he heard taught in church and in his home about Jesus’ love and kindness and the frightening image of Jesus as a “crucified and bloody corpse” {Memories 13). Many other elements of organized religion also struck terror into his young heart, such as seeing the The Personal & Mythic Father

33

ministers with long black coats and the shiny black boots that were worn to funerals, and overhearing his father’s account about an in¬ famous Jesuit. These metaphors had multiple meanings for him that only served to reinforce the ambivalent view he had of religion, espe¬ cially buttressing its negative side. Given what we have learned of the frightening side of his mother’s No. 2 Personality, such experiences doubtless only increased his youthful anxiety. From his youth onward Jung was concerned with the liberating and therapeutic dimensions of religious images and rituals. Through¬ out his long life he was to explore thoroughly the implications of an alternative vision to that which his father represented. The healing dimensions of a religious vision rather than the stultifying aspects of religious belief and doctrine were the central features of this vision. Jung had many important visions in childhood, stemming from impressive experiences that exerted a powerful impact upon him. Toward the end of his life he disclosed many of these for the first time, in his autobiography. These include the so-called man-eater dream, which created the fear that he would be devoured, and later a vision of a cathedral being destroyed, the memory of which brought him a feeling of liberation and exuberance. The man-eater dream, with its core element of an erect phallus, would seem to evoke the memory of a frightening primal sexual experience. In one of his letters to Freud, Jung speaks of a sexual assault by an older man whom he had “wor¬ shipped.” Quite possibly the man-eater dream is linked to this child¬ hood experience. Jung kept the memory of the assault secret from all except Freud until old age. The account does not appear in his autobiography (see Freud and Jung 49j). The “cathedral destroying” vision is something else again. From the way this vision is presented in Memories, it would seem that Jung had the unacceptable heretical thought that God from the heavens was intent upon destroying his father’s church. One can speculate that the young Carl may have rea¬ soned that a church that honored blind belief and that had in effect destroyed his father’s spirit and psyche needed itself to be destroyed. Jung recounts: “God sits on His golden throne, high above the world—and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathe¬ dral asunder” {Memories 39). These are forbidden thoughts that Jung kept to himself and never once thought of sharing with his parents. How should they be interpreted? Clearly they reflect something of 34

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

Jung’s childhood anger, together with destructive overtones. This vision seems to be directed at his father’s church and indirectly at his father. To his great surprise, lifting this inner rage to the level of consciousness and expressing it in thought is therapeutic. With the intonation of a burden being lifted, he states: “So that was it. . .. In¬ stead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known” (40). His image of an enormous turd falling on the roof of a cathedral would seem to be destructive of conventional piety and to awaken negative impulses. These images of the underground phallus and the turd striking the cathedral, as Jung in other contexts has taught us in his writings, have multiple meanings. The careful reader can readily ascertain that the youthful Jung was very far from being a Christian in any ordinary sense. In fact, he was anything but.

Childhood Secrets and Private Ritual For the first nine years of his life Carl Jung was an only child. From his youth astrological signs such as those of Virgo (the Virgin) and Taurus (the Bull) were to fascinate him. By his own account he spent long periods of isolation and suffered from illness during his early years. Jung’s early childhood was filled with ominous and sin¬ ister events. He had several brushes with death, as when he nearly slipped through the rungs of a bridge. We have already noted some of the ways Jung as a child developed private rituals. Most of these were disclosed to no one. For instance, he held imaginary conversations with a carved manikin associated with a yellow varnished pencil case of his early school years. At the end of his ruler he carved a little figure about two inches in length, and he included a frock coat, a top hat, and shiny black boots. This figure he blackened with ink, sawed off his ruler, and placed in his pencil case, where he even made “his friend” a little bed and an over¬ coat out of wool. In the pencil case he also placed a smooth black stone from the Rhine, which he said was “his stone.” The carved manikin in his pencil case he carefully hid in a place known only to himself. At times when his father was irritable or his mother’s illness was especially troublesome, he would think of his manikin friend. At these times he would secretly retire to the attic of the house to look at the manikin and his stone and to communicate his secrets in private. The Personal & Mythic Father

35

Each time he would place into the case another little scroll of paper, which contained messages written during school hours in a “secret language of my own invention” (Memories 21). In his autobiography Jung notes that the manikin was his attempt to give shape to the secret that he mentions in connection with “the dream of the phallus” (21). These private rituals made such an im¬ pression on him that in Memories he tells of other blackish painted stones and carved figures of wood that he had well into adulthood. These objects evoked echoes of early memories. Years later, without consciously recalling his childhood experi¬ ence, Jung was to carve out of wood two similar figures that he had reproduced in stone and supplied with the name Atmavictu, which means “breath of life.” Significantly, he relates that it was a “further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream which was now revealed as . . . the creative impulse” (23). Even later in life he was to note that a similar cloaked god, a “veiled kabir” of the an¬ cient world, was located in the temples of Asclepius. Classicists have pointed out that the healing cult of Asclepius in ancient Greece and Rome had phallic associations with the god Telesphoros (Smith and Lounibos, chap. 2). Jung later became aware of these associations. In his autobiography he recalls his youthful experience with the little man in the pencil case (Memories 21). The phallic elements he came to view as archaic psychic components. Indirectly Jung acknowledges the phallic component but curiously does not directly connect it with his own experience of sexuality. Daniel Noel has called attention to Karl Kerenyi’s “The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi,” where Kerenyi refers to “ghostlike phallic demons,” and his work on Asclepius (and Telesphoros) as “possibly represen¬ tations of the phallus” (Noel 241). On this point Noel has written:

Along with all this phallicism it is important to recognize the cen¬ tral part played by hiddenness, secrecy, mystery, or invisibility. The clothing of Telesphoros —the hooded cloak, which goes back in Jung’s remembered images to the clothes worn by pallbearers and the “disguised” Jesuit—has this meaning; but so does the cof¬ fin or kista in which the kabir is concealed and, by extension, the chamber which hides the phallus beneath the meadow. This is the “veiled” character of Telesphoros the kabir, the shape Jung gave to his childhood secret. (228) 36

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

The youthful Jung’s “veiled kabir” or preoccupation with the carved, hooded Telesphoros strikes me as unmistakably connected to his own autoeroticism. The name Telesphoros means “he who brings com¬ pleteness,” for it identifies a god of inner transformation. Clearly, from Jung’s early childhood his private myths and rituals were a source of comfort to him, an isolated and lonely child. Jung’s childhood experience of Christianity, his confirmation, and his first experience of communion were all disappointments to him, as was his father. Much later his identification with Freud as a sur¬ rogate father made him euphoric for a time, as did his identification with the “holy cause” of psychoanalysis. (This topic will be addressed in the next chapter.) Having secrets became a matter of special im¬ port. The “man-eater dream” {Memories 12), not recounted until late in life, has been interpreted by various psychoanalytic writers as Jung’s awakening to the frightening aspects of sexuality. Jung’s autobiography provides ample evidence that time and again the young Carl wanted to share his rich visionary life with his father but was put off. He feared, perhaps correctly, that his father would not understand his feelings. Profound doubts arose about virtually everything his father said. Late in his school years Jung complained: “I would have liked to lay my difficulties before him and ask him for advice, but did not do so because I knew in advance what he would be obliged to reply out of respect for his office. . . . My father per¬ sonally gave me instruction for confirmation. It bored me to death.” When the subject of the Trinity came up, his father confessed that it was a topic he had never understood. Here was a subject that truly fascinated the young Carl, precisely because it was a logical impos¬ sibility. “Here was something that challenged my interest: a oneness which was simultaneously a threeness.” We can see that from an early age Jung was not primarily interested in distinct and separate ratio¬ nal ideas but rather ones that could be experienced. Intuitively the notion of the Trinity fascinated him because of its “incomprehen¬ sible” nature and its very “inner contradiction” {Memories 52-53). Following Erik Erikson, many psychologists have shown the great importance of identity formation for later personality development. The reader of Memories may well be struck by the way that Jung was both unable and unwilling to accept his father’s double vision of the world. On the conscious level Johann Paul Jung was an exponent of the Christian faith, but on a deeper level other feelings existed. One The Personal & Mythic Father

37

gets the feeling that for Jung’s father, life became profoundly exter¬ nalized. Feelings of depression and despondency were either denied or repressed. For the elder Jung, belief and faith were exalted, while religious experience was deprecated. At all costs he avoided an im¬ mersion in “despair and sacrilege which were necessary for an ex¬ perience of divine grace” (Memories 55). In Jung’s view his father had committed a sacrificium intellectus of which he himself was incapable. For his father, like Tertullian before him, even a faith that was absurd was not a cause for concern. In later years Carl Jung was to say that he was unable to believe anything that he did not understand. This was one of the reasons that religious gnosis was to have such great importance for him. As Jung grew up he was acutely aware of the paradox that existed in his father’s use of Christian doctrine, especially the church’s teach¬ ing that Christ died for the salvation of the world. He was also aware of the painful reality that for him the church itself represented death and not life. Years later Jung recalled the disappointment he experi¬ enced after receiving his first communion. Of that experience he wrote: “Why, that is not religion at all. ... It is an absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there, but death” (Memories 55). He wondered whether the failure of com¬ munion to have a positive effect upon him was his own fault. He had prepared for it diligently and had desired an experience of grace and illumination, but nothing had happened. This fact of his psychic ex¬ perience was to make him feel “cut off from the Church and from my father’s and everybody else’s faith” (56).

Early Rejection of Traditional Religion Jung’s repudiation of traditional Christianity (or better still, his efforts to supersede it in certain respects where it produced pathology and not health) has several sources. One of the most important is connected with his failure to identify with his father. There is some evidence that as a child he held the church to be devoid of meaning, for his father and for himself also. His father, a traditionalist, saw his task as being the defender and guardian of Christian doctrine, even though he became despondent and despairing in the effort. As Jung could not identify with his father or his ideas on religion, he was predisposed to look for answers to important questions else38

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

where. The traditional ideas of God as an all-loving judge just did not work for him from his school days on. He was to reject once and for all his father’s vision of religion. To his mind, it had only succeeded in making his father an unhappy, frustrated, and miserable man. Apparently Jung was to hold Christian institutionalism to some extent responsible for the fate that had befallen his father. Having to be the protector of Christian doctrine was for the elder Jung an onerous task. Johann Paul Jung lost hope and was frequently de¬ pressed, for he could not face his doubts, which remained largely unconscious. For this Carl was to blame the moribund and sterile nature of Christian religion as he had experienced it. Hence we have one of the reasons for his profound ambivalance toward Christianity throughout his life.

Recent Interpretations Peter Homans in Jung in Context has argued that Jung’s primary problem in growing up should be understood to be related to nar¬ cissism. Following Heinz Kohut, Homans argues that psychosexual development necessarily negotiates three stages: an undifferentiated one, that of narcissism proper, and the oedipal stage of object rela¬ tions. Kohut has particularly focused upon the second stage of “ideal¬ izing transference” and “mirror transference.” By calling attention to the way in which Jung developed a grandiose self and grandiose fan¬ tasies, Homans, I believe, has made a valuable contribution. We need to remember, however, that narcissism is but one explanatory strand in a chain of formative factors that all played a part in the develop¬ ment of this complex man. Jung’s primary conflict, in my view, concerns not his narcissism, as Homans holds. It should, I believe, be related primarily to the split between his Personalities No. i and No. 2. The narcissistic ele¬ ments of his temperament, though, do seem to stem from his failure to identify with his father. As we will see in the next chapter, on his relation with Freud, this inspired his “desire to merge with a power¬ ful source of self esteem” (Homans, Jung in Context 40). Jung’s own intense religious visions would seem to stem from the experience of his own inner dissonance. In an elaborate process of visionary or active imagination, an elaborate set of mythical con¬ nections was set in motion. In another way his rejection of tradiThe Personal & Mythic Father

39

tional Christianity stemmed from his analysis of modern society and its unique spiritual problems. Murray Stein cites a variety of dark and ominous images to call attention to what he has termed Jung’s Christianity complex. He argues that at the center of this complex, together with Jung’s early suspicion of Jesus and his perception of God’s dark side, stood Jung’s own father. His father was caught, Stein says, in “Peter’s net,” by the task of having to be the guardian of Christian doctrine even though he became very unhappy in the process. Stein has performed a useful service to all interpreters of Jung by emphasizing that one of Jung’s lifelong psychic tasks was to over¬ come the legacy he received from his father. In Stein’s book, Jung's Treatment of Christianity, he maintains that this was the reason that Jung was to become a therapist to the Christian tradition. From his own experience and later in his experiences with patients, Jung be¬ came convinced that Christian culture had become stultified. Hence Jung’s basic concern was to address the integration of unconscious and archetypal images into the wider circle of consciousness. His own early remembrances of his father served to remind him, lest he forget, of the debilitating effect of his father’s psychic woundedness. Even at an early age he intuitively knew that he must follow a differ¬ ent path, one more in keeping with his own inner reality. Stein underscores the stunning impact of the elder Jung’s tragic suffering upon his young son. Jung himself writes: “My memory of my father is of a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas wound, a ‘fisher king’ whose wound would not heal —that Christian suffering for which the alchemists sought the panacea. I as a ‘dumb’ Parsifal was witness of this sickness during the years of my boyhood, and, like Parsifal, speech failed me. I had only inklings” (Memories, 215). But frequently inklings suffice. People are rarely able to hide their true feelings from those who know them well. As Stein has so vividly ex¬ pressed it, for Jung, his father was both representative and victim of an ailing religious tradition (“Significance” 24). Thus, one of Jung’s lifelong tasks became to breathe new life into the dry bones of Chris¬ tian imagery. In responding to Stein’s emphasis upon the stultifying impact that Jung’s father had upon Jung’s life, another analyst, Harry Wilmer, suggests that his father’s woundedness may have been Carl’s salva¬ tion: “Just as the wounded wounds himself, so the healer heals him40

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

self” {Memories 216). Jung experienced deep wounds in connection with both his parents. His explorations into the imagery of creativity were later to address this pain. From what we can tell—and there is plenty of evidence on this point—Jung never identified with his father’s view of life but very early was taken up with his own fantasies, images, and visions. As a lad when he walked to school from Klein-Htiningen, he had “the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud. I knew all at once: now I am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an ‘I.’ But at this moment I came upon myself” {Memories 32). As we saw in the previous chapter, Jung developed a profound ambivalance toward his mother because of her divided personality. Be¬ cause of her illness, his father came to assume a motherly role (part of Winnicott’s interpretation). Yet his father was in his own way also a deeply divided individual. As we have seen, he was of two minds toward the Christian religion. Consciously, he was its champion, but unconsciously he obviously doubted its veracity. Given his father’s conflicts and the way his own development pro¬ ceeded, it was absolutely necessary for Jung to pursue his own path. However, the matter seems to be even more complex. On still another level it would seem that just as Jung’s father assumed the mother’s role at certain early periods of Jung’s life, so too Jung’s primary ambivalance toward his mother was transferred to his father and on a deep level to his father’s church. This could well be still another rea¬ son for his childhood fantasy of a turd from the heavens thundering down upon those powers and principalities (the Basel cathedral?) that were thwarting and so directly affecting his own life. If Jung was inwardly split, as Winnicott and Satinover have strongly contended—and as I tried to show in the previous chap¬ ter-then doubtless maternal as well as paternal determinants were involved. Jung’s various attempts to overcome his inner rift became the source of his most enduring and creative explorations. This is true with regard to his own psychic integration and his contributions toward alternate qiodes of realizing the spiritual quest.

The Personal & Mythic Father

4i

We are lived by Powers we pretend to understand. — W.H. Auden, “In Memory of Ernst Toller”

Jung & Freud: A Daimonic Tug of War

As never before, the childhoods of both Freud and Jung are the subjects of a great deal of scrutiny. It is now becoming apparent to most investigators that the classic features of the legend¬ ary Freud-Jung saga (1907-13) owe many of their most interesting features to the activities of the unconscious. This is true not only of the motivations that brought these great men together but also of an assortment of features of the relationship itself.,It is no exaggera¬ tion to say that their lives and letters bear eloquent testimony to the activities of the unconscious that they propounded. It is my desire to illuminate the features of this relationship by exploring its largely unconscious motivations. Many questions can be posed: Aside from 42

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

desired collaboration, wider recognition, respectability, and expe¬ diency, what factors drew the two men together in the first place? Which factors sustained the relationship? What were the virtually inevitable factors that led to the bitter dissolution of their collabora¬ tion and friendship? Freud had discovered the psychoanalytic method, published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, and made his mark as a pioneer of a new approach to psychiatry. His major experience had been working with neurotics. His colleagues were nearly all Jewish physicians. Jung had built a reputation at the prestigious Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich for his work with schizophrenics. Not inconsequential, of course, was the element of complementing one’s worldview with the stimulation of a new perspective. Jung had a personal vitality and sense of presence that Freud found compelling. Jung, for his part, knew that Freud was on the cutting edge of a therapeutic technique that was just then coming into being. The psychoanalytic camp has complained that Jung was a deviant. This is Ernest Jones’s view. Both Freudian and Jungian commenta¬ tors once agreed that Jung’s theoretical development in the years dur¬ ing his psychoanalytic affiliation prompted his open split with Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. Careful review of Jung’s early work by investigators like Paul Stephansky fails to substantiate this assumption. This scholarship indicates Jung’s honest belief that “his limited appropriation of certain psychoanalytic mechanisms and at¬ tendant theoretical modifications constituted full-fledged loyalty to psychoanalysis as he understood it” (Stephansky 216). It now appears that from the beginning there were acknowledged differences of ap¬ proach between Freud and Jung concerning the practice of psycho¬ analysis. The Freud-Jung correspondence has been the subject of intensive reinterpretations by both Freudians and Jungians in recent years. These studies make it quite clear that the infatuation that charac¬ terized the relationship embodied several unconscious determinants. Much more than professional interests were at stake in this relation¬ ship. Early identity needs were involved, as was the feminine dimen¬ sion of each man’s personality structure, which Jung later was to term the anima. Ernest Jones (2:141), without real evidence, insists that Jung was more deeply involved in the relationship than Freud, but a close readJnng & Freud

43

ing of their correspondence does not substantiate this claim. Both men were committed to the relationship. Freud frequently initiated the exploration of new topics and complained that Jung did not reply soon enough. Yet for a long time the relationship was symbiotic and stimulating to each man. There is little doubt that the termination of the relationship was far more traumatic for Jung than for Freud, but this may merely reflect the fact that Freud had already been through similar experiences with Joseph Breuer and Wilhelm Fliess. A nega¬ tive factor in Freud’s temperament had a way of asserting itself time and again. Even a biographer as sympathetic and protective of Freud’s image as Ernest Jones claims that Freud- suffered from a psychoneurosis. Jones maintains that it was in the years when Freud’s neurosis was most intense (as during his relationship with Fliess) that Freud did his most original work (Jones cited in Brome, Freud 126). Vincent Brome has surmised that Freud’s sublimated homosexual impulse re¬ directed his libido to the highest creative purposes. This interpreta¬ tion implies that Freud’s experience was an original source for direct involvement in the development of his concept of sublimation.

A Father Complex with a Holy Cause The father-son complex that emerged between Freud and Jung was a significant determining factor for the relationship, more than any other single element. It profoundly stirred and exhilarated both men from the start. In 1906 Freud’s reputation was already secure. He was fifty years of age, whereas Jung was a relative neophyte of thirty-one. Their relationship expressed a numinous quality accom¬ panied by dual feelings, tinged by a certain eroticism. It appears to have been characterized by a love-hate ambivalence in which tempo¬ rarily one factor or the other was either overemphasized, projected, or repressed. On Jung’s part, repressed anger toward “the father” was a significant element. Very early on, a strong, almost magical attachment developed between the two men. Jung and Freud’s first meeting, on Sunday, March 3, 1907, resulted in an animated discussion in a smoke-filled room from early afternoon until the early hours of the next morn¬ ing—a thirteen-hour marathon. The bonding was instant, if flawed. Each man supplied something the other lacked. For Freud, Jung em44

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

bodied youthfulness, vitality, the epitome of manly vigor, and a gen¬ tile constituency. By 1907 Freud had become the savant of psycho¬ analysis. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams were already behind him. He had received widespread rec¬ ognition, if not permanent status, for his controversial theories on the etiology of neurosis, but he perceived that his movement had a narrow cultural, ethnic, and geographic base. Jung, though a relative neophyte working with schizophrenics, broadened the applicability of psychoanalysis and represented a wider gentile community. Jung’s need for Freud is harder to identify, but it seems to lie in his desire to be perceived as a pioneer. By allying with his greatest contempo¬ rary in psychology, pioneer, Jung could enhance his own image and reputation. In Memories Jung tells us he was displeased to discover that his association experiments agreed with Freud’s theories. He was in fact tempted to publish the results of his experiments and conclusions without mentioning Freud. As he puts it: “After all, I had worked out my experiments long before I understood his work. But then I heard the voice of my second personality: ‘If you do a thing like that, as if you had no knowledge of Freud, it would be a piece of trickery. You cannot build your life upon a lie.’ With that, the question was settled. From then on I became an open partisan of Freud’s and fought for him” (148). The fact that Jung’s association experiments were in agreement with Freud’s theories was hardly sufficient reason for Jung to attribute them as much to Freud as to himself. The attri¬ bution is curious, for in most situations Jung was not known for his self-deprecation. As the loyal ally of Freud, he would appear to have temporarily submerged his own sense of ego. Already one sees the intensity of Jung’s need to align himself with a kind of holy cause, or, as he puts it, “warfare” against external foes. On one level the re¬ lation was bonding in quest of professional status. On a deeper level it may represent, as Homans indicates, “a psychic merger” (Jung in Context 40). Throughout his life Jung was not averse to espousing unpopular causes in both psychology and religion. In fact, he seemed to thrive on it. At the start of the relationship with Freud, Jung was a brash, selfconfident bon vivant who exuded optimism and was the very epitome of the ambitious, even self-serving young psychiatrist. His profes¬ sional experience complemented that of Freud, for he was recognized Jung & Freud

45

for his work The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. “Jung . . . showed himself full of self-confidence and surrounded by the aura of success. He promised the marvelous” (Shengold 189). This mutual enchant¬ ment must have raised unrealistic expectations. We have here the hope of a mutual metamorphosis in the Faustian mode. Surely these men must have dimly glimpsed that the relationship awakened un¬ conscious striving. In their correspondence, the notion of the devil or daimonic comes up with frequency and is a metaphorical pseudo¬ nym for instinctual drives. A primary source for the Freud-Jung correspondence is The FreudJung Letters, published in 1974 and edited by William McGuire.

There we can see that from the start, Jung’s view of psychoanalytic inquiry is considerably different from Freud’s. Jung seeks Freud’s ap¬ proval, but it comes with strings attached. In an early letter Freud says, “I am delighted with your promise to trust me” (8f). One sus¬ pects that Freud planned to allow some modest measure of indepen¬ dence to Jung, with the idea that Jung would come around in due time. The words sacrifice, deviate, and abandon are repeatedly used by Freud, with appropriate symbolic meaning. Jung is admonished to hold true to Freud’s doctrine. In another early letter Freud writes: “Don’t sacrifice anything essential for the sake of pedagogic tact and affability and don’t de¬ viate so far from me when you are really so close to me for if you do we may one day be played off against one another” (iif). Freud’s request is ridiculous when closely analyzed. Nonetheless Jung “duti¬ fully” complies. In a follow-up letter Jung says, “I shall never aban¬ don any portion of your theory that is essential to me, as I am far too committed to it” (i2j). I am struck by Jung’s phrase “essential to me,” which suggests his adherence only to those of Freud’s ideas he found useful to himself. This indicates that even at this early phase of their relationship, Jung’s compliance may not have been as com¬ plete as it would seem at first glance. Again we can see that key words like trust, sacrifice, deviation, and commitment indicate that Freud ex¬ pects Jung to be a “true believer” (to employ Eric Hoffer’s phrase) and that Jung willingly obliges. In the initial phase of their correspondence, Freud especially seems to need the letters and chides Jung for his lapses in writing and for letting the opponents of psychoanalysis affect his writing (iif). Freud was not always one to let the chips fall where they would. One 46

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

senses mutual admiration in the letters; flattery exists on both sides. Jung commends Freud on an “excellent analysis” (19j) and signs, as it were, a bond of mutual allegiance. There are, of course, attempts to deny this development. In one place Jung writes: “I only fear that you overestimate me and my powers” (19J). In 1907, when Jung was discussing delusional persecutory ideas on paranoia with Freud, he wrote: “The delusional ideas are as a rule a crazy mixture of wish-fulfillment and the fear of being injured. The following analogy has always struck me as enlightening: the religious ecstatic who longs for God is one day vouchsafed a vision of God. But the conflict with reality also creates the opposite for him: certainty turns into doubt, God into the devil, and the sublimated joy of the unio mystica into sexual anxiety with all its historical specters”

(24J).

Rapidly in their friendship Freud and Jung formed a close link against the challenges of the outside world. In the euphoria of posi¬ tive transference, they were “warriors together” against the foes of the new movement, and they often used the language of battle. In one place Freud writes: “Thank you very much for the two bomb¬ shells from the enemy camp” (27F). For a long time there was much psychic stroking in the letters. Both men performed idealized imaging for the other. They were also “priestly confessors” to one another, offering absolution without the need for undue acts of contrition. Freud says, “What you call the hysterical element in your personality, your need to impress and in¬ fluence people, the very quality that so eminently equips you to be a teacher and guide, will come into its own even if you make no con¬ cessions to the current fashions in opinion” (38F). In a follow-up letter Jung agrees that his ambition provokes his fits of despair (39J).

Religious Allusions At one point Jung voluntarily took a vow of submission and sub¬ servience to Freud, somewhat like a disciple or initiate to an om¬ niscient master. Seemingly Jung preferred the subservient role; ap¬ parently he feared too great an emotional involvement with Freud. Typical were statements like “I shall naturally confine myself to your theory” (19J) and “I have boundless admiration for you both as a man and as a researcher” (49J). Jung’s excessive veneration shows how strong was his need to be liked and accepted by the older man, but Jung & Freud

47

I suspect that it was unconsciously encouraged by Freud. The adu¬ lation suppressed the element of self-conscious determination and competition that existed between the two men. The question arises as to whether Jung even wanted a relationship of mutual autonomy with Freud. Early on, he clearly did not. There is more emotional security in a formalized relation. Throughout their correspondence and collaboration, Freud was the one who took the initiative and who sometimes bitterly complained that Jung had not written for a considerable time. One could also interpret this as a re¬ sistance on Jung’s part toward even deeper psychic involvement with Freud. In due time Jung’s reverence turned into resentment and rage. The early allusions to the eventual falling-out, even if tongue-incheek, are striking. Early in the relationship Jung indicated he lived “from the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table” an unpublished letter of Freud to Jung of February

(29J).

Later, in

28, 1908,

Freud

said that “Jung was to be the Joshua destined to explore the prom¬ ised land of psychiatry which Freud, like Moses, was only permitted to view from afar” (Jones

2:37).

Later still, Freud expanded on the

Moses/Joshua metaphor and said: “If I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry” (Freud and Jung

125F).

In an article entitled “Freud’s Father Conflict,” Edwin Wallace in¬ dicates that Moses played many different roles in Freud’s unconscious life. He writes: “There is a bewildering array of identifications. Freud is alternately Moses the glorious father, Moses the victimized father, Moses the conquering son and parricide, Jesus the redeemer, Ikhenaton the father, Joseph the victim. Freud’s father, Jung, and others are variously represented by these roles as well”

(52).

There are other

pseudo-religious allusions in the correspondence. One is Freud’s ref¬ erence to Jung’s trip to Amsterdam as an “apostolic journey,” in that it was aimed at proselytizing for the Freudian cause. Another is when Freud approved of one of Jung’s confessions: “What you say of your inner developments sounds reassuring; a transference on the reli¬ gious basis would strike me as most disastrous; it could only end in apostasy” (Freud and Jung

52F).

Still another biblical allusion can

be seen in the letter from Jung to Freud in which Jung proclaims: “Anyone who knows your science has veritably eaten of the tree of paradise and become clairvoyant” (28j). Jones translates the passage as “whoever had acquired a knowledge of psycho-analysis had eaten 48

Formative & Transformative Life Experiences

of the tree of Paradise and attained vision” (2:32). Conversion to the cause, discernment, and proselytizing, on the one hand, and apostasy and spreading heresy, on the other, form the opposite sides of a secu¬ larized doctrine seemingly rooted in the conflicts of childhood and allowing little room for unorthodox deviance. Jung confessed to Freud a traumatic event of his childhood: “I was the victim of a sexual assault of a man I once worshipped” (Freud and Jung 49J). Shengold has said the “ ‘man [he] once worshipped,’ who¬ ever he was, must have had the significance for the boy of his pastor father and of the Christian God with whom Jung was so ambiva¬ lently obsessed in his youth” (193). Shengold is only partially correct. The effects of that childhood trauma affected Jung throughout his life and clearly came into play with his relation to Freud. Jung did not become obsessed with the Christian God, as Shengold contends. Rather, his ambivalence toward his father, the church, and the tradi¬ tional deity initiated his quest for a heterodox deity. Indeed, we may well have here one of the primary reasons that Jung’s notion of God was so idiosyncratic. For instance, a tenet to which he steadfastly clung was that deity was as much characterized by evil as by good.

Sexuality and the Response to Godlike Power In Memories Jung goes to considerable lengths to point out that for Freud sexuality is a numinosum (150). His contention is that in effect it is a “sacred datum” for Freud in its determining power and unquestioned ability to explain. Reading this, one might get the im¬ pression that Jung is contending that Freud was unconsciously reli¬ gious. Another possibility is that Freud was influenced by his un¬ conscious in much the same way a believer would be influenced by God. That is, he was motivated by an unconscious daimon. From his standpoint, Jung only slightly overstates his case when he insists: “At bottom, however, the numinosity that is the psychological qualities of the two rationally incommensurable opposites—Yahweh and sexu¬ ality-remained the same” (151). Yahweh and sexuality may in some ways be similar, but they are not identical. When Jung writes to Freud, “I fear your confidence” (Freud and Jung

49J),

one suspects that he both feared and desired it. Given

Jung’s ambivalent relation with his father, it would seem that numi¬ nosity (comprising both attraction and repulsion) also characterized Jung & Freud

49

the tone of his relation with Freud. As Vincent Brome has put it in Freud and his Early Circle, “Freud would have recoiled in horror, and rightly so, from Jung’s attempt to invest his propositions with reli¬ gious meaning.... Jung develops a series of mystical attacks on Freud which use an ill-defined farrago of terms totally alien to the vocabu¬ lary of Freud” (112-13). Brome’s point is that like many attempts to describe mystical experience, Jung’s remarks extend the meaning of terms like numinosum and thus blur rather than clarify the meaning intended. Jung’s childhood sexual trauma, reluctantly confessed to Freud, deeply motivated his behavior during this period. He writes: “This feeling, which I still have not quite got rid of, hampers me consider¬ ably. Another manifestation of it is that I find psychological insight makes relations with colleagues who have a strong transference to me downright disgusting. I therefore fear your confidence” (Freud and Jung

49J).

Jung’s emotional scar, carried so long in secret, re¬

sulted from the actions of an admired and respected father figure. The effects of this painful memory are in turn projected onto Freud and are evident in the “religious crush” that develops. Because of Jung’s earlier trauma, with understandable ambivalence he both fears and desires the relationship with Freud. In a follow-up letter Jung explores a dream he had when he visited Freud in Vienna. He dreamed that Freud walked beside him and was an extremely frail old man. Doubtless the dream is a form of un¬ doing. As Jung says, it set his mind at ease about Freud’s dangerous¬ ness. In the following letter Jung confesses: “My old religiosity had secretly found in you a compensating factor which I had to come to terms with eventually”

(51J).

Jung leaves the matter of a connec¬

tion between his religiosity and his feelings toward Freud somewhat oblique; it is not clear what is being compensated for. I sense that just as Jung claims that for Freud sexuality is a numinosum, for both Freud and Jung residual feelings of unconscious energy are tinged with overtones of sexual feelings. Paul Roazen has called attention to the passage in The Interpreta¬ tion of Dreams where Freud states: “My emotional life has always in¬ sisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual” (cited in Roazen, Freud and 5°

Formative fcr Transformative Life Experiences

His Followers 31). Under certain circumstances friend became enemy. Clearly, the inner dynamics of both Freud and Jung were such as to make this possible. At the same time that Freud was carrying on a correspondence with Jung, he was also corresponding with Karl Abraham. Abraham first worked at the Burgholzli under Jung and Bleuler and later in Berlin. The Freud-Abraham correspondence helps us to understand more clearly one of the reasons for Freud’s attraction to Jung: expe¬ diency. Simply stated, Jung was a gentile and possessed a persuasive manner. He could serve as an apostle to the bourgeois Swiss and others of the wider gentile world in a period when a rapid expansion of psychoanalytic teaching was to be desired. At the Salzburg Congress in April 1908, which Freud attended, both Jung and Abraham had made presentations on dementia praecox. Jung had argued that a toxin acting as a pathogenic agent was responsible for the disease, a position he had stated elsewhere. In his paper Abraham failed to cite the previous work of Bleuler and Jung. In a letter to Freud, Abraham wrote: “They turn aside from the theory of sexuality, therefore I shall not cite them in connec¬ tion with this” (Freud and Abraham 36, dated May 5, 1908). Jung was irate at the slight and wrote to Freud: “The chief obstacle is my pupils. ... To get ahead at my expense, while I stand still. ... I beg you to have patience with me, and confidence in what I have done up till now. I always have a little more to do than be just a faithful follower. You have no lack of those anyway. But they do not advance the cause, for by faith alone nothing prospers in the long run” (Freud and Jung 86j). Freud then tried to mediate between Jung and Abraham. He needed them both, but on the issue at hand he was to agree more with Abraham than with Jung. He wrote to Jung, advising him to be helpful if Abraham consulted with him about the publication of his dementia paper and to “accept the fact that this time he took the more direct path, whereas you hesitated” (Freud and Jung 87F). As Robert Steele has put it, “Abraham’s orthodoxy was highlighting Jung’s deviancy” (209). In a letter to the young Abraham in Zurich on May 8,1908, Freud wrote: Please be tolerant and do not forget that it is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are Jung & Freud

51

completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellec¬ tual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner re¬ sistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psycho-analysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair. (Freud and Abraham 34) Freud had no way of knowing that Jung had come to differ pro¬ foundly with the views of his father. Jung, at that phase of his life, completely rejected institutional religion. Freud wanted a gentile connection to give the fledgling movement of psychoanalysis respect¬ ability, and Jung was the first gentile to give the movement status. In a letter to Freud in July of that year, Abraham reported: “Jung seems to be reverting to his former spiritualistic inclinations. But please keep this between ourselves. However, if Jung gives up for this reason and for the sake of his career, then we can no longer count on the Burgholzli” (Freud and Abraham 44, July 16, 1908). Two letters later Freud mentioned to Abraham his suspicion that the suppressed anti-Semitism of the Swiss that he was spared himself “is deflected in reinforced form upon you” (46, July 23,1908). Strong rivalries developed between Abraham and Jung, which Freud tried to mediate for the good of the cause. To Abraham, Freud wrote: “You see ... how important it is to me that in these matters in which each of you forms an opinion of the other both of you should turn out to be wrong and I to be right. I cannot tolerate that ‘two such fellows’ both of whom are close to me should not be able to get on with each other.” Later in the same letter Freud confessed: “Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism” (Freud and Abra¬ ham 63-64, Dec. 26, 1908). In Freud’s overall scheme for the dis¬ semination of his teaching and the expansion of his movement, Jung had a purpose to serve. Abraham was to replace Jung in Freud’s affections, just as Jung had replaced Fliess. After the schism was an irrevocable reality, Freud wrote to Abraham: “So we are at last rid of them, the brutal, sancti¬ monious Jung and his disciples” (Shengold 230). Interestingly, Shengold points out that Freud had used this very word brutal to charac¬ terize Fliess. Freud had described Fliess’s pamphlet on bisexuality as 52

Formative x73

vol. 13, 79 collective unconscious, 53, 56, 72, 79, hi, 169 and creative complex, 170 definition of, 127 complexio oppositorum, 136 conscience, function of, 173 creative illness of Jung, 80,141 criticism of, 109 as exploration of the unconscious, 66 interpretations of, 67 origins of, 62, 63 and religious imagery, 69-70 as schizophrenia, 68-69

203

creativity healing as motivation for, 170 Jung’s, 30, 68, 73, 87 psychological vs. visionary, 169 source of, 161,168 daimon, 26, 27, 30, 87,109,159 definition of, 161-62 prominence of, in Freud-Jung relationship, 46, 49, 61 Daly, Mary, 93, 95-96 dementia praecox, 51, 54, 56. See also schizophrenia Deri, Susan K., 164-66 divinity, and gender, 124, 133 Dodds, E. R., 67,162 Eastern religions, 78,105,112,142 ecstasy, no Eliade, Mircea, 66-67,I(56 Elijah, 73 and Philemon, 75 Ellenberger, Henri, 54, 80,100, 108 empiricism, 124-25 as different from metaphysics, 113 enantiodromia, 102, no, 125-26, r44 Erikson, Erik, 37,142 father. See Jung, Johann Paul Achilles Faust. See Goethe feminists, attitude toward Jung, 93-96 Fliess, Wilhelm, 44, 52 Fordham, Michael, 22 Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 3, 5, 85 Freud, Sigmund appeal of, to Jung, 45 and expectations of Jung, 8 as father figure to Jung, 59, 63, I23 204

identification of, with Moses, 48,58 Jung’s break with, 43-44,

58-61 as professional, 43, 80 as sufferer of psychoneurosis, 44, 59 as Yahweh, 134-35 Freud-Jung Letters, The, 43, 46

Freud-Jung relationship numinosity in, 49-50 power imbalance in, 47-48 religious allusions in, 48-49 roles of Jew/gentile in, 51-52 Fromm, Erich, 124,172 Gedo, John, 22, 23, 69,109,142 gnosticism, 2, 35, 55, 78, 152, x53-54 God declining effect of, 143-44 Jung’s ambivalence toward, 132 Goethe, 54, 65,100,102 divided personality of, 107 Hannah, Barbara, 67, 74, 85, 87-88 healing inner, 73 Jung’s, 68 and religion, 34 as source of Jung’s innovations, 171 See also self-healing; wounded healer Heisig, James, 63, 76, 77 Hermes of Trismegistus. See alchemy hieros gamos (sacred marriage), 57, I33> 136 Hillman, James, 161 Hogenson, 58 Holderlin, 65, 70,101 Homans, Peter, 22, 39, 45, 54, 55, 60, 68, 73,118,122,148-49 Index

hypostatis and hypothesis, 118, 157 imago dei, 142 incest, 57, 65 individuation, 82,129-30,172,

x73-74 inflation, personality, 107-8,109,

J37 Jacobi, Jolande, 114-15,147 Jaffe, Aniela, 4,14-15, 76,101-2, 131 Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, 57 James, William, no, 113,120 Job, Jung’s identification with, 131. See also Answer to Job Jung, Carl Gustav attitude of, toward Christianity, 33, 34, 37-38, 40,122,147 and Buber, 156-57 as childhood victim of sexual assault, 3, 49, 50 childhood schizophrenia of, 23 childhood rituals of, 19, 35,154 and criticism, 7,114,116 dreams of, 26, 50, 70-71, 63-64 and Eastern religions, 78,112, *52 as empiricist, in, 114-15,122, 145-46,156 and Freud, 37, 43, 44, 53, 64 image of, protected and manipulated, 4, 5-6,15, 17-18, 83 and imagery, 78 narcissism of, 39, 55, 60, 73, 122,149 and Personalities Nos. 1 and 2, 2,18, 20, 24, 29, 39, 56, 77, 89,103,148,150,152,159-60 and rebellion against father, 40, 41 Index

and religion, 6,120-22,131,150 and religious experience, 39, no, hi and separation from mother, 18 and sexuality, 34, 37 and shamans, 160 and Smith, 156 and The Golden Kettle, 101 and theologians, 123,124,146 unconscious of, 109 visions of, 6, 21, 41, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70-71, 72,107-8,109 and visionary creativity, 169-70 See also creative illness of Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung, Emilie Preiswerk (mother), H effect of, on Jung, 2, 26, 81-82, 89 hospitalization of, in 1878,17 Jung’s ambivalence toward, 16 mysticism of, 26 and Personalities Nos. 1 and 2, 16, 25, 26, 29-30, 34, 91,102, !5°

unreliability of, 15,18, 25, 56 Jung, Emma Rauschenbach (wife), 5, 27, 61, 82 and Freud, 86 and Toni Wolff, 85, 86, 89 usefulness for Jung, 87 Jung, Johann Paul Achilles (father), 123 and attitude toward vocation,

13-H. 32-33’ 39 emotional repression of, 37 Jung’s disappointment in, 37,

38 Jung’s image of, 33 motherliness of, toward Jung,

20. 33 powerlessness of, 2,18 205

Jung-Freud relationship. See Freud-Jung relationship

influence on Jung, 54, 65, 70, 100,101,106, no, 143 Zarathustra, 103-4,120

Kant, influence of, on Jung, ioo, 112, II5

night-sea journey. See creative illness of Jung

Kerenyi, Karl, 36,155

Noel, Daniel, 36,180 n. 4,181 n. 1

Kesswil, Switzerland, 13

numinosity, 26, 66, 73, 94

Klein, Melanie, 89,126

numinous, 2, 25, 26, 30, 44, 88,

Knowledge, Jung’s theory of, 112, 127

170 attraction for Jung, 102

Kiisnacht, Switzerland, 1 object relations theory, 28-29, 87 mana personality, 27,104,137 mandala, 108,153,155-56,171,172,177

Papadopoulos, Renos K., 24-25, 64

Marcovitz, Eli, 64

paradox, 78, 79

May, Rollo, 162-63

Perry, John W., 22

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Philemon, 108,109,138

(autobiography), 2, 5,103,

as guide for Jung, 75

160,177

Jung’s identification with, 6

man-eater dream in, 6, 34, 37 cathedral-destroying dream in, 34

Jung’s father in, 40 manipulation of image in, 5-7, r5

mother remembered in, 16 mental illness. See creative illness of Jung metaphysics, vs. empiricism, 113

philosophy, importance of, to Jung, hi Preiswerk, Augusta Faber (maternal grandmother), 14 Preiswerk, Helene (cousin), 82 Preiswerk, Samuel (maternal grandfather), 54 and belief in ghosts, 14 primordial image, 104. See also archetype

Miller, Miss Frank, 53, 57, 65

projection, 88,125,164

Modern Man in Search of a Soul,

Protestantism, shortcomings of,

H2,121,170,174 mother. See Jung, Emilie Preiswerk mystics, 104,152 myth> 53> 55-57

importance of, to Jung, 6,141 Neumann, Erich, 124,143,165 and matriarchal spirituality, 95-96 Nietzsche divided personality of, 107

206

120 psyche, vs. soul, 126 psychic integration. See individuation Psychological Types, 125, 126 Psychology and Religion, 149 Rank, Otto, 56 reality, absolute vs. psychic, 116 Red Book, The, 4, 76-77, 78 religion feminine archetypes in, 95

Index

and numinosity, 119

Gustav: and personalities

psychic origin of, 124

nos. 1 and 2; Jung, Emilie

and psychology, 124

Prieswerk: and personalities

symbolism in, 120

nos. 1 and 2

See also Eastern religions;

split feminine, the, 90, 91,135-37

Jung, Carl Gustav: and

Staude, John-Raphael, 103

religion

Steele, Robert, 51, 53

Romanticism, as influence on Jung, 99-110

Stein, Murray, 3, 33, 40,121,147 Stern, Paul, 17 Storr, Anthony, 15, 66, 68, 81,

Salome, 73 Satinover, Jeffrey, 22-24, 29_3°> 122,126 scarab, 72, 73 schizophrenia, 20, 22, 51, 76,107 See also dementia praecox;

160-61 Swedenborg, 104 Symbols of Transformation, 53, 57, 64,141 as rebellion against Freud, 55 symbols, multivalence of, 166

Jung, Carl Gustav: and personalities nos. 1 and 2;

Telesphoros, 36-37

Jung, Emilie Prieswerk: and

theologians, feminist, 92

personalities nos. 1 and 2

therapy, role of therapist in, 161

Schopenhauer, 100,104,112

transcendent function, 130

and archetypes, 104-5

transformation, 101

divided personality of, 107

truth, 124

self, 19, 25,129,172

Jung’s definition of, 113

self-healing, 30, 40,138 Jung and, 23, 29, 79 See also wounded healer self-integration, 27 Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons of the Dead), 77-78, 109, 154-55 shamans, 9, 66,163-64

unconscious, the, 56, 65, 76,101, 105-6,116,120,165 in Freud-Jung relationship, 42 and reconciliation with the conscious, 107-8 and religious function, 124 and symbols, 127

Shengold, Leonard, 49, 52 Slochower, Harry, critique of Answer to Job, 134-35

von Hartmann, Eduard, 104-6

Sophia motif, 55, 94, 96,132-33, i36> *37

Wehr, Gerhard, 5, 82, 83

soul, vs. psyche, 126

Wheelwright, Joseph, 22

Spielrein, Sabina, 4, 27, 82, 83, 91

White, Victor, critique of Answer

“Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, The,” 6,143,151 spirituality, feminist, 92-96 See also religion split personality. See Jung, Carl

Index

to Job, 134 Wilhelm, Richard, 2, 79,143, 153, *55

Winnicott, D. W., 2, 20, 28-29, 30,126,137-38

207

Wolff, Toni, 27, 73, 82, 83, 89 omission of, from Memories, 5, 85, 86

omission of, from Memories, 4, 6 wounded healer, 160

usefulness for Jung, 87

Chiron as, 177

companion of Jung during

Jung as, 2,15, 75

creative illness, 74 women

Yahweh, 49, 94,130-33

Jung’s attitude toward, 81-82,

91

208

Zaratbustra. See Nietzsche

Index

SANDY SPRINGS

B JUNG Smith, Robert C. The wounded dung

SDY SP

fooljc 7777/ Atlanta-Fulton Public Library

ss

NOT

1996

Smith’s findings are based on the unprecedented number of primary sources to which he had access, including archival research, his own interviews with many of Jung’s intimates, and personal correspondence with Jung himself, as well as on the synthesis of a wide range of recent scholarship on Jung. The culmination of many years of scholarship and reflection, this book should be read by anyone interested in spiritual healing or the connection between psychology and religion.

Robert C. Smith is a philosopher and retired historian of religion. He has been a visiting lecturer at the C. G. Jung Institute in Switzerland.

“Smith persuasively shows that only the wounded Jung could have become the healer who founded a still-evolving movement for healing. Indeed, the greatest contribution of Smith’s scholarly book may be to underscore this spiritual lesson that even Jungian psychotherapy—let alone the wider popular culture of personal growth—is often tempted to ignore: no loss, no gain.” Daniel C. Noel, author of

Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion

“Simply indispensable for a truly existential under¬ standing of Jung’s psychological theory.... required reading for both professional a

md their

patients and highly recomment

sted in

the labyrinthine ways of the hu Stanley Riukas, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

“Clearly written, highly readable, Smith’s book is sure to generate very intense discussion.” Gene R. Thursby, University of Florida

Jacket photograph: Carl Jung. Photograph by Dmitr Life Magazine © Time Inc. jacket design: Rich Hendel